Visiting the Ukrainian Gift Shop in Minnesota

While Laura and I were up in Minnesota in July we made our first trip to the Ukrainian Gift Shop in Roseville, MN. We went hoping to get some pysanky supplies to maybe give decorative egg design another go and did we ever hit the motherload! They had so many great pysanky eggs on display.

It's not the kind of store that gets too many customers that the owners didn't know personally and so they had a few questions as to why we were there. We explained that we had lived in Ukraine last year and we soon became fast friends. We got a little tour of the shop and even got to see some pysanky being made. 

We did also find all the supplies we would ever need.

On one wall they had a wooden painting of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko...who I've written about many many times.

They even had a small profile bust of Taras that I bought. It was some very old stock and was originally made in Russia before the fall of Communism based on the tag on the piece.

Pysanky Egg Making At KU

Roughly a year ago Laura and I got to visit the Pysanky Museum in Kolomyia, Ukraine and it was my second favorite museum from our travels in Ukraine behind the Cosmonaut Museum. And so yesterday Laura and I had the opportunity to learn how to make pysanky at KU.  

The first step was to draw on your design onto the egg. We were told that when designing the egg it's best to use raw eggs and then after it is complete you can remove the yolk. When drawing on your design try to do it as lightly as possible.

We picked the design in the right corner for our egg. It's a pretty basic with lots of straight lines. 

Our egg with the design added.

Then using a tool called a kitska you put melted beeswax on the areas you would like to keep white. 

If you know Laura then you can guess which color we dyed the egg. 

As you can see the beeswax stops the dye from reaching the egg shell. 

Here is the dried egg after dying. If you are going to use multiple colors it's important to go from light to dark on the color spectrum. 

When you are done dying you can melt the beeswax off the white areas.

Here are some of the completed eggs done by our pysanky guru Megan. Maybe with a little practice we can someday make eggs as half as good as this. If you are interested in doing some pysanky yourself you can find all the tools you'll need HERE.

The Pysanky Museum

One of the main claims to fame of the smaller city of Kolomyia is their museum honoring the traditional Ukrainian folk art of egg decorating called Pysanky.  Each  region has its own style of creating the eggs along with traditional designs and colors.  Eggs created in the Kharkiv area are typically brown in color.  

Without a doubt the Pysanky Museum was the best designed museums that we've visited.  It was almost as if they built it to attract visitors and to let people know "hey, there's a museum of decorated eggs over here."

We got stared at for quite a while when we posed in front of the egg.  I think we were possibly the only tourist in Kolomyia that day.

Photos weren't allowed inside the museum so I was only able to sneak a few photos of the massive collection they had on display without the museum guardians catching me.    

This was just one of the many cases they have on display and in total the museum has over 10,000 eggs in their collection.