Happy Easter

Have a Happy and Blessed Easter!

In our Swieconka basket:

Butter/Maslo: often shaped into a lamb, known as Baranek Wielkanocny, to remind us to share the goodness of Christ to all things. Seen in our basket in a small bowl marked with a cross in clovers.

Bread/Chleb: a loaf of rye bread, symbolizing Christ as the staff of life.

Eggs/Jajka: representing new life and Christ's resurrection.

Sausage/Kielbasa: a symbol of God's generosity.

Ham/Szynka: representing joy and abundance (also marked with a cross of cloves in our basket).

Salt/Sol: essential to life, and a reminder of Jesus saying "You are the salt of the earth."

Cheese/Ser: a symbol of moderation (we've got 2 - because we really like cheese)

Chocolate: my one concession to commercialized Easter. Because I like chocolate. ;-)

The basket is then covered with a fine cloth and taken for blessing. This year, I chose a linen cloth hand embroidered in cotton with sunny yellow blossoms.

Missing this year: horseradish/Chrzan, symbolic of the passion of Christ. I usually include a section of the root, rather than the sweetened preparation, which would later be served grated fresh onto the eggs. Our local grocery store didn't have any, and I never got a chance to go someplace else to look. Growing up, my mother would dig some out of our own patch. The pieces with some greenery starting to show at the top were not peeled completely, and my mother would share them with friends to plant in their own gardens.

Also traditional:

smoked bacon/slonina, symbolizing God's over abundance and mercy.

holy water, used to bless the home, animals, fields and used in religious rituals all year.

a candle to represent Christ's light to the world.

The basket is often decorated with colorful ribbon and/or sprigs of greenery. Others would include fruit or a bottle of wine. One of my favorite things about getting the baskets blessed is seeing all those other baskets, and the interesting things people put in them.

The basket contents are then included in meals throughout Easter Sunday. Because the food is blessed, remnants such as eggshells are supposed to be burned, not thrown out.

All done!

Dragons Eggs
(traditionally made for Chinese New Year)

3 T black tea
1 T Chinese five-spice powder
1/2 C soy sauce
1 tsp sugar

Gently boil 6 eggs (we used 12) in water for 15 minutes.
Drain, cool and tap egg with a metal spoon until the eggshells are cracked all over.
Cover eggs with water in saucepan, add ingredients and simmer for 3 hours.

Our traditional Easter basket includes peeled eggs. On Easter Sunday no work is to be done unless absolutely necessary, even just peeling eggs. When we made these for Chinese New Year one time, I knew I had to include them in our Easter basket.

The premeasured ingredients, ready and waiting while the eggs cooked for there 15 minutes.







Once they were cooled and cracked, back into the pot they went with the soy sauce and everything else.







A quick stir to combine the spices, tea and sugar into the liquid. Looking pretty gross at this point! LOL







After one hour of simmering, the eggs still look fairly pale.









At two hours, there's still little visible difference. By this time, I had added some extra water to the mixture, as it was starting to get low.





Three hours later, and they're now sitting in some cold water until cool enough to handle.








As they were peeled, I put them back into the water to rinse off any bits of shell or inner skin that might still be sticking. Of the 12 we did, only 1 was "lost" in the peeling, where the white stuck to the shell and tore. Pretty good, actually - I expected to loose at least 2. Youngest promptly enjoyed the "defective" egg.




Finished! Eleven dragons eggs, ready for the basket. Aren't they gorgeous?

more eggs - kraszanki, plus.

And now, eggs we can actually eat!

Another traditional method of coloring eggs for our basket is kraszanki.


The eggs are cooked together with yellow onion skins for about 45 minutes, or until they reach the colour depth desired. Since we don't usually have that many onion skins about the house, I pick mine up from the grocery store, gathering the loose skins that have already fallen off the onions that are for sale.





I've had these turn out a variety of shades, from relatively pale like these, to a deep, almost brown colour. I really like them.








Meanwhile, the girls dyed their own bunch of eggs using a basic grocery store kit. Of the dozen I cooked for them, I got 11 with uncracked shells, so they got 5 each. Here's Youngest's work so far.






The finished eggs. You can just see the alchemical symbol for mercury on one of Eldest's eggs. The egg by itself at the top was odd egg out, and I just dipped it half into the dye for a few moments, drying it between dips, before we dumped out the colors cleaned up.




Soon to come...

Dragons eggs.

Eggs, eggs everywhere!

Real eggs, this time, not the stitched ones.

We started out with wax resist eggs. This year, I wanted to do some blown eggs to replace the ones I gave away in the move, figuring they wouldn't survive it very well. *L*


After cleaning the eggs thoroughly, I used the largest needle I had to make holes on each end of the egg, with the one at the base somewhat larger, then blew out the contents. I was after 8 shells, which took 11 eggs. A few of them broke as I was making the holes. I counted on having at least 6 eggs by the time I was done. *L*







One they were all blown, they were washed thoroughly in soapy water. I made sure to get water into the shells and washed them out as thoroughly as I could. That was followed by a rinsing in vinegar water.






After they were done, I set them up to dry overnight. I made a drying rack with a piece of craft foam and cocktail toothpicks, with some paper towel for absorption.







The next day, the dyes were mixed quite early, as it needs to be cool before starting. In this picture, you can see the raw eggs the girls and I had done at Gawdessness' the day before. Raw eggs do very well for dying. The contents eventually dry up over the years. On the left are the blown eggs, while a kiska (size medium), beeswax and teacandle are ready and waiting.




As the dye cooled, I market most of the eggs in pencil. Here, you can see how an elastic band can be used to mark even lines.








I left a few eggs blank, while others were marked freehand.









A bit of wax is scraped into the wide end of the heated kiska, then carefully applied to the shells.

It was at this point, as I was bent over the counter, carefully applying the wax, and the cat decided to visit. She jumped up onto my back, then used me to get onto the fridge. Thank goodness I noticed her just before she jumped, so I was braced for it. *L* Later on, as I was well into other colours, she jumped down onto my back - and got comfy! That made things just a bit challenging. I had to get one of the girls to take her off so she wouldn't slide and scratch up my back as I straightened. LOL

Unlike raw eggs, blown eggs will not sink into the dye, so they need to be turned a few times while in the dye bath. The commercial packets of dye sold for wax resist methods colour the shells very quickly, and can be reused for years.






After a second bath in the dye, here are a few eggs drying before their next application of wax.









They're all done - and I still had eight! The easiest way to remove the wax is in the oven. A few layers of paper towel or newsprint on a baking sheet, then into a 200F or 250F oven, and the wax easily wipes off, though I did have to tuck the last two into the oven again, as the wax had cooled too much to wipe off by the time I got to them.



The finished eggs.

I think they turned out pretty good. :-D

Easter Temari

I've probably started this way too late, but today I've finally started making some Easter temari. I've made quite a few of the regular round balls, but this is a first for an egg shape.

First off, wrapping the foam egg was much more challenging. Having some quilt batting to pad the egg a bit helped, but once that was covered, the threads kept wanting to slide. When I finished wrapping, I ended up having to get extra thread to tack things into place, so they wouldn't slip.

It's also the first time I've used a white base. I know I haven't made it anywhere near as thick as I would've liked, but I simply couldn't see the gaps. For the next one, I'm going to wrap a layer of yarn before the thread and see if that makes a difference.

Once wrapped, I divided the egg into 8 sections, then found the equator, in the same manner as for a ball. Marking the 8ths with pins in the center was different, though, as the circumference is not the same. A second strip of paper was used for that. For this egg, I chose a pale pink metallic thread (3 strands of 6) to mark the divisions, making sure to go back and tack down the crossovers at each pole. I debated tacking the equator as well, but decided against it. Normally, I would leave the equator pins in place while stitching, but the thread tends to catch on them. It meant the thread tended to slide around, but it was easy to see where it needed to be pushed back to.


For the wider base, I decided to mark the centre points of the stars farther out from the pole (the green pins), then marked the outer distance for both ends the same (black and yellow pins). For the narrow end, I planned to place the points as close to the pole as I could, so there was no need to mark anything.






Working the pattern went much faster than I expected, even with the rayon floss (the full 6 strands). That was another change I made. For the Easter eggs, I wanted the high sheen that the rayon gives. It's very slippery to work with, and had a tendency to tangle and twist back on itself. Not something I'd want to work with very often, though the effect was quite lovely.

The only modification I made from a simple star pattern was in the middle. After laying more metallic thread for the obi and tacking it down with pale yellow, I felt it was a bit too open, so I added the large crossed threads as well, which were then tacked down at the obi to keep them from sliding out of place.

For the wide end, I chose a bright blue and red. I normally would not have used the flash to take these pictures, as I hate how it reflects back so horribly, but I no longer had good light when I finished this. The flash does show, however, how much of a sheen the rayon thread has.

After stitching everything up to the yellow crosses, I used the metallic pink to add stitches at the pole for a star. Once it was done, I passed through to the obi and tacked the yellow crosses in place with the same thread.


For the narrow end, I chose a more muted blue to go with the green. It's almost a silvery blue that worked quite nicely with that shade green. As a whole, the pattern is busier than I favour, but I think it turned out quite nicely.

I have a total of 6 foam egg cores, but right now I'm not sure that I'll do that many. I'll probably do at least four, but we'll see. It depends on how much time I have for it, as I've picked up some basic new wax resist supplies (to replace those still packed in a box in storage) and will be dying blown eggs. We'll be dying cooked eggs using other methods as well - by the time Easter over, I think we're going to be pretty sick of eggs! LOL

Final say: This project definitely isn't for someone just starting temari, but I wouldn't say it requires a lot of experience first, either. The pattern and stitching is extremely simple, but the materials aren't. The egg shape has its own challenge when wrapping the base, and it also limits the choices in pattern - which isn't necessarily a bad thing. *L*

The rayon thread in particular is difficult to work with, compared to ordinary embroidery floss or pearl cotton. As well as being slippery and easy to tangle, I found that the threads didn't pull through evenly, and I'd have to carefully pull on each strand separately to find which ones were bunched up. Also, a lot of extra thread needs to be pulled into the wrapped thread to prevent the end from sliding out when starting a new thread. Keeping the length of end thread hidden under a white base is also a bit of a challenge, as the colour is easily seen through the white. At the narrow end, I was sometimes able to simply pull the needle through the entire foam core to hide the ends.