Annies Crazy World

These are our 2009 Painted Easter Eggs (prior years eggs can be seen here.)

This year I painted my egg into a Kokeshi Doll, I had the idea last year when I visited the Cowera Japanese Garden and saw there display of Kokeshi Dolls and thought how well there simple shapes would fit around an egg.

Eggs are a unique shape and over the years that we have been painting eggs it has been interesting to see how the egg shape can be used, it makes some things are really difficult to represent other things fit quite naturally onto the egg shape.

This year my sister also thought of an idea that fitted naturally onto the egg, she is reading the Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters which inspired her to paint her egg as a monk complete with tonsured head and I love his little sandled feet.

The egg shape also fitted my niece’s idea, when she was young I made her cups of tea in a miniature china tea set (cup is about 1 1/2 inches high), when I bought the miniature tea set she was unable to say cuppa and would ask me if she could have a Pucka tea, she has fond memories of those occassions and wanted to make her egg into a Pucka Tea Cup…As I said the egg shape was suitable for making a cup but it was not so easy to achieve because it required sawing the egg in half across the weakest area of the shell, I broke a few eggs trying and in the end we used one that I repaired with paper machae and then reinforced around the rim with finger nail Acrylic, I also used the finger nail Acrylic to attach the wire handle, the saurcer is made from cardboard.

To decorate my sampler eggs I have done rows of embroidery stitches making them miniature samplers…Because Easter Eggs are wrapped in bright, shiny foil I have used shiny threads for the stitching on the eggs and all the threads are metalics or rayon.

Now that Easter is over I have got time to record Easter on my Sampler or st least get it started…I started by drawing 2 eggs and outlineing them in black stem stitch, the black looked to severe so I overstitched it with a fine varigated matalic thread which has softened the edges.

These are our 2008 Painted Easter Eggs and below are detailed images of a few of them.

Lily used her cat, Tiger, as inspiration for this egg, In past years I have given her assistance cutting and glueing the ears and extra bits to her eggs, this year age 11 she did the entire thing herself. I love the cat’s tail, it is a piece of one of the skewers that we put the eggs on when painting them.

Lauren has used her life at uni for her inspiration dividing her egg into halves, one half for the series study at the Australian National University, the other half for the social life.

For her inspiration my sister used the same image of our mum that I used on mum’s memory quilt, under the Mango tree.

I also used mum’s memory quilt for inspiration (and continued a theme that has run through my work)…I Painted a cloths line on my egg…I put a post on either side of the egg and ran a line around each side, when I saw the magnified image I could see that it is not very well painted but at egg size it looks good…When you can hold the egg and spin it the design works well but it is the hardest yet to photograph.

Well I have taken Photos of our painted Easter eggs and have them ready to upload but every time I try and upload them I am getting an error message, that I don’t understand…I will try again in the morning and fingers crossed that it will fix itself overnight.

It has become tradition for the Canberra branch of the family to paint eggs at easter..The following links explain how the the tradition got started, the eggs we have painted in past years and other eggy stories.

Scrambled Eggs for Breaksfast, Lunch or Tea

Painting Eggs – Its become a Family Tradition

A Rare Sight

Our 2007 Painted Eggs

Humpty Dumpty is sitting on the wall

I am not quite as organized this year as I was last year and still have to blow and undercoat more eggs but everything else is ready to go.

Patricia commented that my repaired eggs would be even more special now and she is so right. You may not have noticed but one of the repaired eggs hadn’t been finished and I didn’t expect that it would be but the nephew was so impressed that I had repaired it that he finished it and to me that makes it even more special.

These are our 2007 eggs

Mine is the candy egg (top right corner) like the ones we had when I was a kid…when every one is here I can only do a simple one because I am on call to find cardboard etc and help when required.

For my second egg I thought that having repaired the eggs, humpty dumpty would be the appropriate egg for me to paint this year and I remembered that I had made one before for the top of a cake I made for a nieces 2nd birthday in 1983 (Cake design frim The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book), I found the Photo and started making one the same but have decided that the cardboard coat makes him far to stable to be humpty so I am now going to Paint the coat onto the egg shape.

At Easter we paint eggs so it seemed appropriate to me to paint eggs on my sampler…I used a fine metalic thread to stitch around each of the egg shapes and then used acrylic paints to colour the eggs and a black permanent ink marker to write the letters on the eggs.

In my neices words Painting Eggs has become a family tradition, Easter 2005 I blogged how the tradition got started and 4 years of painted eggs.

I didn’t get Our 2006 eggs blogged…initially because I wasn’t very organized to get them dated, lacquered, photographed and put away…subsequently because while they were waiting for me to finish them I knocked them on the floor….Oooooooops

I was upset with myself but not devasted because from the beginning I had let them be touched because really they have to be held and turned around to appreciate their full beauty, they are a living collection which means they are at risk of being broken…still I didn’t know what I would do if one did get broken…

I picked up the pieces, put them in a box and put the box on a shelf in a dark corner. I just couldn’t bring myself to throw the pieces out.

A couple of weeks ago I pulled the box out and wondered if it was possible to repair them, what if I glued strips of paper under one side of the join with half the paper sticking out so that I could glue the matching bit of shell to the paper as well…nothing ventured nothing gained…I seperated the pieces for each egg, 2 of them broken into largeish pieces, 2 of them with shattered ends, each egg with about 15 pieces to be joined…it took time because I had to let the glue dry before joining the next piece…

…the joins are far from perfect but the eggs are in one piece and the cracks give them character.

I am well aware that this is a crazy thing to have done and you are allowed to laugh, Everyone else has…what I find more amazing than the fact that I was able to do it is that when I picked the pieces up off the floor 11 months ago I actually found every last chip of all the shells.

Below are all the 2006 eggs

Some of you may recognize the wall on my egg, as the one on my Bags of fun, ‘A Charming Garden’ bag.

I am organized this year…I have all the eggs blown and undercoated, have purchased new fine brushes and have the paints all ready….Wishing you all a happy, safe Easter.

In 1999 I was curator for a National Trust ‘Craft in Trust’ Exhibition…One of the Exhibits was a collection of hundreds of painted eggs…They had been painted/dyed by the family and friends over the last 30 years, as on Easter Sunday every year the family got together with a table of dyes, paints and pens, and 2 blown eggs per person, the first one painted goes into the collection the second one can be taken home….As Curator I was invited out to see the collection so that i knew what I would need to display them and to join the family in painting them that year, the middle egg above is the one I brought home….And I was so captivated and enchanted by the collection that I came home, blew some eggs and got the kids and one of their friends painting them that night….I love that the babies hand prints and toddlers splodges look perfect next to the works of art, that some are abstract, some are patterns and others have represent real themes and things…

It was a few years before I managed to organize doing it again but in 2003 I got the nieces and nephews over, we had a lovely day and the photo below is the eggs we painted….

Here are our 2004 painted eggs….Mine is the red with white spotted Mushroom, I can’t remember why I chose to paint a mushroom but 6 months later while in England I was thrilled to see real red with white spotted mushrooms…My niece Lauren painted the trout because she had been fishing and caught one that morning…My sister did the portrait of Lauren wearing my plastic tiara, which she pops on her head every time she visits…each egg is signed and dated and I can see them becoming a sauce of family memories.

A few tips for anyone wanting to paint eggs…

….Use good quality, thick shelled eggs, even then some breakages happen, when it is only a crack PVA white woodworking glue can be dribbled in through one of the holes and rolled around inside to reinforce the cracked area.

….To blow the eggs you need a tiny hole the end you blow into and a slightly larger hole in the end the egg comes out, I use a jewlers drill to do the holes but you can use a needle or drill bit twisted with your fingers. Make sure that you have broken the inner skin of the egg at both ends…..after blowing I wash the inside of the egss with warm soapy water and rinse them well.

After a few years of practice I have learnt that it is best to prepare the eggs ahead of time and I now use a spray undercoat to give a nice working surface.

…I like to keep the organizing as simple as possible and only supply acrylic paints (the kind sold in tubes for students) and permanent ink markers…Should you want to do more variety of decorations Sharon has been surfing around and posting links to sites with decorated eggs….Use Skewers to hold the eggs while painting and a piece of polystyrene foam is handy to stick the skewers in while the eggs are drying.

…Plan on having scrambled eggs for one of your meals on the day, When I have the eggs prepared prior to the day I still blow the eggs on the day which gives me a start on shells for the following year…Enjoy

Our 2005 Eggs

This is a detail of the handbag that Lauren painted…when she was making the handle it looked awfully wide, I was a bit puzzled as she is good with scale so I questioned her did she really want it that wide?…simple answer “yes, it’s the new fashion” and sure enough her new handbag that I had not seen when she came in, had a huge wide handle……..

And mine is A Globe of the world, chosen for 2 reasons.

Firstly that since last Easter I have been lucky enough to travel to the other side of the world.

The other reason is for you dear girls and guys that read my Blog and visit my website, before putting a statcounter onto my Blog and website (explained by Sharon on Saturday March 05 2005), I had assumed that my readers would all have been from English speaking countries…How wrong I was, nor can they all read English, the statcounter indicating when a translator has been used and I have had links from French, German and Russian crazy quilting groups….as I saw how many countries I was getting hits from I started making a list and in 8 weeks I have had hits from 80 different countries…I am quite awed and humbled by that statistic…and it fills me with hope for World Peace because ever day when we turn on our TVs, switch on the radio or read the newspaper the news is telling us that this country is fighting with that country and this other country is going to war with that other country But now I can look at my computer screen and list and see all those countries side by side, part of a united, world wide community and I can think/hope that maybe, just maybe one day crazy quilters will take over the world and we will have World Peace…well maybe I am dreaming a bit but I do believe that crazy quilters are gentle, caring, sharing, peace loving folk and the more of us in the world the better………..