Ukrainian egg designs templates

What does it mean? Pysanky is a Ukrainian word for eggs decorated with wax and dyes. A pysanka is created around spring time to celebrate life.

One decorated egg is called a pysanka, while many decorated eggs sitting in a bowl would be called pysanky. For generations, people in Ukraine decorated eggs with symbols using dyes and beeswax.

During the pre-Christian days, Ukrainians decorated eggs to celebrate the springtime with its new life and rebirth. Symbols during this period represented health, happiness, love, harvest, fertility, etc. After Ukrainians converted to Christianity, they continued with their egg art traditions. This time, people decorated their eggs for the blessing of the Pascha basket on Holy Saturday.

Holy Saturday is the day before Easter Sunday. However, the very same symbols displayed on the eggs had new Christian meanings. I grew up with Ukrainian heritage. My mom and dad had a huge wicker basket that they would fill with all of the necessary items. This of course, included pysanky. We also included a braided paska bread, and sometimes Ukrainian babka. Babka is a sweet bread or cake. Bakers use a tin can and sometimes place icing and sprinkles on top.

Also, one needed to include butter in the basket. The linked files below are all PDF files, as they are the easiest to print out. These patterns are fairly simple diasporan rather than definitely traditional Ukrainian patterns, but they are good for learning. Simple Pysanky : Three 3 simple traditional pysanka patterns. Good for beginners. Spiral Pysanka : Rooster and pine branches pattern.

A fairly easy pattern. Star Pysanka : Another fairly easy pattern with a traditional 8-pointed red star. Advanced Pysanka : A more advanced pattern featuring a windmill motif.

You then connect your marks with pencil and have your divisions! For thirds , mark every other 60; for halves , mark every other NOTE: Odd divisions 3, 5, 7, etc. To create these divisions, you will ned to either eyeball them, or to use a compass and a bit of geometry to figure it out.

The egg needs to be stabilized held very still in order to use the templates successfully. Since one hand holds the template in place, and the other holds the pencil, you would need a third hand to keep the egg from rolling away. I put the egg sideways across a cup in an egg carton — paper seems to work best, but styrofoam will do as well. See photo below. The carton will hold the egg in place while you draw.

I also have a plastic egg holder that I often use, which a friend got for me from a medical laboratory — it was disposable packaging material. You can see it in some of the photos below. I usually draw the straight division lines first with a lathe, and then apply my circles.

I then center the circles on the templates over the division lines on my egg, as Fuzz demonstrates here:. In this case, there is just one line running through the circle. Note that the line on the egg lines up with the markings on the template!