This week is a delicate little floral creation that reminds me of a tea-dyed calico print. I started with a brown chicken egg, approximately 2 1/2 inches tall. Once all my wax outlines were done, I etched the natural brown color off of the shell with a vinegar soak of just a few minutes. It was a shorter soak than I planned because as sometimes happens, some of the wax lines had not adhered correctly to the shell and started to float off into the vinegar thereby obviously negating the masking effect of the wax. You can see in the top left corner of the first photo that one of the side of the leaf is much lighter - that is where the wax didn't adhere well enough. I took it out, dried it off, and re-waxed the lines that were gone. Rather than take the color all the way down to white, which was my original intent, I decided to go for a softer tea-dyed effect. I used bright green for the leaves and then dipped directly into maroon for the tiny flowers. I rinsed off the maroon with water until it was a lighter pastel and waxed over that color for the larger flowers. Since all the wax had been either re-drawn or just drawn over when I was working with the other colors, I thought it would be safe to try to etch the background down to a lighter cream color and it worked out just fine. I hope you like it!
Happy Friday, everyone!
