Friday Egg

A contemporary egg today, in pinks and grays.  This is my "hollyhocks" design. I have been enjoying making this is different colorways all week.  I started with a dyed-black egg  for the main outlines, then etched it with vinegar to white.  I outlined the center petals in white, then dyed the egg dark red.  After filling in the central circle, I rinsed the color to get the medium pinkish-red for the middle circle, and then rinsed again to get the outer lighter pink circle.  Next I worked on the stems.  I decided to do purple and teal - I have a tendency to always choose green for stems and leaves and that is just a bit boring and predictable.  I like how you can see the red outlines even on the stem - I really only notice that etching edge when I use red.  I will have to keep an eye out and see if other colors leave a trace on the wall of the etch.

I like the way it turned out - it looks like hollyhocks on a stormy day.

And here's a few photos of the other colorways:

And all of them together; a little flower garden for this lovely early summer Friday.

Friday Egg

Aqua, purple and blue quilt design.  I've been doing this pattern a lot lately, haven't I?  I think I like it because of the combinations I can get between curves and straight lines.  It's rhythmic without being boring.  

I started with a brown egg, as you can see.  Etched it down to a lighter brown with a vinegar wash, then dyed it aqua, cobalt blue, and light blue.  I etched it again in vinegar, thinking that a light background would be nice, but the darker dyes kept leaking out of the pores of the eggshell after etching.  It sometimes happens that way.  If the egg is a commission and I need a certain combination of colors, I can combat it in a few ways.  I can etch it, dry it quickly and slap wax on it really quickly to try to keep the color from leaking out. This usually only works if there are small areas to cover.  The areas on this egg were too large for that to work.  Sometimes I can let an egg dry out thoroughly, then try to etch it again in vinegar.  That usually works the best, but is much more time consuming.  Since this was just for fun, I decided that a purple background would be perfectly fine. 

Happy Friday!

Friday Egg

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!

Friday Egg

We're late! We're late! For a very important date!

JoJo decided for the first time in her short life that she wanted to stay up playing and/or crying and/or screaming until 10 p.m. Her normal bedtime is 7:00, so you understand that this put a mighty big crimp in my blogging style. She finally collapsed exhausted at her door and went to sleep on the floor. I went in a few minutes later to try to gently put her in bed without waking her and wouldn't you know it, she had gotten into bed and tucked herself in all by herself. Funny kid. I live in hope that she will sleep in tomorrow morning.

Today's egg is a stylized owl done on a brown chicken egg. A woman at one of my Easter shows saw an egg with the same type of placement of lines and thought it looked like owls, so I decided to try it. I like how it worked out, and will be trying a more advanced version next time with more details. Please forgive the funky photos (see above!)

Happy Friday to everyone, and I hope your bedtimes go more smoothly than ours did today.

Friday Egg

Some weeks doing the Friday egg seems like no big deal. Then there are weeks like this week where at 3:30 p.m. I realize I haven't even started to work on an egg, much less make an egg I like well enough to post on the blog. I decided to work on an egg I got last weekend from a vendor at the Hope Farmer's Market. It is from a Phoenix Bantam chicken and about 3/4 the size of a chicken egg.  The smaller the egg, the less time it takes to make, and I wanted to get this done, cleaned off and photographed by midnight tonight!

I was thinking of a geometric abstract sea creature design made with dots. I don't remember the name of the creature I am thinking about, but it has a series of dot-like nubs that get smaller and smaller as they travel toward the central point on the body. The net design in the background was a last minute decision, and I like the idea but the black may be too dark with the light greens and yellows.  I think that the light green background is a little too pale, and next time I will try it with some stronger colors (red, dark red, golden yellow, black).  Hope you like it!

Oh, and even though Mother's Day is this Sunday, my delightful husband saw that I might have need of my present before then (we are busy busy busy until Sunday night). Ta-Da!

The very first latte from our brand new reconditioned espresso maker from Texas Coffee Traders.  I'm so excited - I love my lattes!  

Also, a lovely orchid plant.  I love getting these instead of cut flowers because they last months instead of days.  This one is a replacement for the one I got for Valentine's Day that just dropped its last blossom last week.

And here's my sweet kitty Blanca, at her usual spot on the back of the couch:

Yay for early Mother's Day!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Friday Egg

I will call this my Kimono Quilt egg.  When I do a variation on it, there are some things I will change, but I enjoyed making it.  Not a lot of egg luck this week.  Just various things that went wrong or didn't go the way I planned.  I think that I will put the eggs away for a few weeks and forget what I think they should look like and then when I take them out again, I will probably like them better.

I hope you enjoy the egg today:

Happy Friday!  

Scavenged Arrangement

I realized on my morning walk with the dog that there are some really lovely spring weeds growing. So instead of scooping poop with my plastic bag, I toted home some nameless weeds and combined them with some flowers and foliage from our yard et, VOILA!  Instant arrangement.

Check out this rose bush!  It is totally overgrown and at least 12 feet tall with the most perfectly scarlet roses. We don't water or fertilize it which is probably why it is so happy.  We just leave it alone to do what it will.

Here's an unknown type of tree/shrub that is blooming in our backyard that I also used in the arrangement:

Here's the finished arrangement:

Anyone know what this green weed is?:

I think it turned out amazingly well, considering I spent absolutely nothing on it.

Happy spring everyone!