Drop Pull eggs!

Celena: I have always wanted to try my hand at an egg decorating technique known as "drop-pull" and I finally got the chance! My favorite pysanky supplier started carrying stuff for it recently, plus I was lucky enough to already have some key items so I got started right away.

The idea is you have a hotplate type situation with multiple pots of different colored wax. Originally these little pots were actually a muffin tin which was probably heated up over fire or on an old stove and probably needed to be reheated throughout the process. Modern technology has brought us wonderful electric batik tools however so that's not necessary anymore. One modern change that's not so good is that you used to be able to use crayons for this, however, they're mostly made with soy wax now which doesn't stick to eggs so much. *sigh*

You may notice the small tool laying near the wax pots- this is a tool I purchased a long time ago and have used as a paper embosser along with die cut metal stencils which is a great technique. Of course after 10 or so of your 75 wedding invitations you get a little less enamored with it- I speak from personal experience, can you tell? :)

Anywho, I thought that I was going to use a straight pin stuck into a pencil, which is what the old-school drop-pullers use and what I pseudo-jerry-rigged for myself at first:

It actually worked better than you may think, I was able to find a small nail with a head and stick it into one of my dowel pins leftover from my bookshelves and got the hang of it pretty quickly. The nail lost heat rapidly though and I kept heating it up with a candle and ending up with black soot in my wax- no fun.

But once I discovered that the new tools being made for this technique are just little metal balls on the end, I decided to ferret out my old embosser.

Definitely different, but pretty great! I am having loads of fun getting into this new technique and they are much quicker to make than a typical pysanka so that's really nice.

It fills me with glee to watch these boxes fill up with jewel colored eggs that I made with my hands. I love each and every one of them. I wish I had all the time in the world to sit perched at my tiny desk full of waxes and dyes and just create one beautiful egg after another.

Our first show!

Celena: We recently heard back about our very first joint craft fair application! We're in and we're very excited.

It's set in late October at Leander High School and is benefitting their baseball department. It's an annual fair, so maybe it will be a recurring gig for us? It's very close to our houses, so it would be great if we were able to do it every year.

Selah's been making more of her adorable and fascinating temari earrings and I need to amp up my egg making! We're still in the fledgling stages so we don't have a set booth arrangement yet and we'll be working hard on that as well.

So much to do- all with little ones in tow. :)

Selah: Not really sure what to prepare for, as we're going into this pretty well blind. Don't know how big a show it will be, or how we will fit in with the other booths/venue. Very excited though for being able to get our feet wet and work out some kinks as we hope this is just the beginning of our show/booth careers. I know we will learn so much with this experience and I'm really pumped about the whole thing. Need to make more stuff though, was pretty dejected when I accidentally squooshed an earring that I had almost finished embroidering! Didn't get as much work done on the car trip as I'd hoped, but now that I'm back from our jaunt to Houston; it's nose-to-the-grindstone time.