 Hi there, it's Sandy Olmok and today I'm going to show you this crazy bunny trail I've gone down, making pysunkey eggs and these are etched. For a long, long, long time I have wanted to try pysunkey eggs. So I decided to order a kit. I got this one from a Ukrainian shop in the Midwest in the U.S. because I couldn't order something from Ukraine right now. But this kit comes with so much good stuff in it. And I'm going to give you the caveat. If you're going to follow what I'm doing in this video, you don't need all this stuff. But it comes with directions. It comes with diagrams to show you how to make these complex ones way too complex for my P-brain. So we're going to start much simpler. But the instructions in here are so, so, so good. I can't tell you how good they are. I had to read them again after having practiced and figure out all the things that I did wrong. And this brochure was really helpful that comes with the kit. But it shows you pictures of how to basically do it. You draw with the beeswax onto the egg. You draw it with pencil first and then trace your design using the beeswax. And any place where you put the beeswax is going to remain white. If that's the egg color at the time, you dip it in the yellow. Add more wax. And then you dip that in the orange. The yellow is preserved underneath. This is like masking if you're familiar with that. Dip it in the orange. You put more designs on. You go to the red. You go to the black. You just keep getting darker and darker. And then you melt the wax off with a candle or blow dryer or heat gun or something. And your design is revealed. It's kind of like magic when that moment happens. But we're not doing color in this video because I want to show you something easier. They give you three kitskas in this. There's a large, a medium and the small. The small one I didn't have much success with. But the medium I used a lot and the large one I used a lot. This is how it compares to the fluid writer that I showed you recently. If you got one of these, you could certainly use that to make my sunky. I bought an extra pack of beeswax because I didn't think this little square was going to be enough. And I did like the other wax better. It melted better for me, but I'll be talking about my wax issues as we get on with this. And then I bought a bunch of mason jars to put all of the dyes into. I labeled them before I mixed them up so that I wouldn't get anything confused. When these colors are mixed up, you can't tell what color they are in the jars. The liquid in some cases kind of looks all the same color. Put boiling water and vinegar in them. But read the directions because some colors don't get vinegar. I decided to blow my eggs first. And I marked the tips of them so that I could have the points about centered. Once I figured out that I couldn't eyeball center a hole in my egg. So that was the way I decided I would try to mark it so that I would have the center place. I just did that on graphite paper. You could do it on newsprint as well. And then I used my Dremel. I got my Dremel out for something. And what I discovered after having, of course, ruined a few eggs is using the Dremel on the side to basically make a divot into the egg and get it started. Because if I went straight in to try to make a nice round hole, the thing would slide all over the place. I couldn't get the whole thing to go in the right place. I just didn't work. So I did it as a two-step process and had a hole in both sides, poked the yolk of the egg so it would break. And I used my airbrush. How exciting is that? I got to use my airbrush for this. I saw a lady on YouTube using an airbrush. She didn't have a Copic airbrush like I did. She was able to just blow across the surface of the hole instead of blowing into the egg. And then she only had to have one hole because it just sucked everything out. I don't know how something in the pressure did that. But I just put two holes in mine because, yeah, it was hard. And I did a whole bunch of egg-blowing all at once. So I could have a lot of them to mess up with because I realized quickly when I did my first couple that once I had to blow the egg and then get it prepared and get it washed and everything and then do the wax, I was exhausted by it. So I decided one day I was going to do all my eggs, get them all ready, and then I could sit down for a couple of days, okay, a couple of weeks, and work on making the eggs. Now, I chose practice eggs first because there's some eggs you're going to notice have little places in them that might break. You might have some holes that didn't work out well. And that's kind of what happened to this one. Okay, it happened to a bunch of them. And those were the ones I was going to practice with first because just know that you're going to mess them up. It's just going to happen. But the 48 triangle design has me, like my little brain is so happy with this thing. I can't even tell you. Some people call it the 40 triangle, but it's 48. I made it cross at the top and then drew one side all the way down to the bottom of the egg. If your hole is in the center, then you'll meet up with that hole at the bottom of it. If it's not, then make the line straight and ignore where the hole is. You'll just have a crooked hole. I have a lot of eggs with crooked holes, but it's more important to get the design straight. So now I've got that band all the way around one side and I'm going to make a cross at the top of one of the ends. Because you can kind of eyeball a 90 degree and that's going to at least give you a good start on getting the second line in place. So you'll get that all the way down to the bottom and then you want to make one all the way around the center of the egg. And that's best done if you're eyeballing it like I did just by turning the egg and moving it around. You could make tick marks at the middle points of each one of them. And then if you end up like me with a little place that maybe isn't quite right, figure out which one is closer to right and join them. And you can adjust as much as you want. Don't erase your lines if you screw something up because the lines are all going to disappear once you get your egg going. So don't worry about that. Then to make the rest of the triangles, you're going to make an X in the sections at the top of each. So mark between that top section, mark a place that's halfway up from the equator of your egg and then make an X that goes down to the equator itself. You're going to go all the way around the egg and do that four times. You'll do the same thing on the bottom. So once you get all of that done and you count, you should have all these sections that have a whole bunch of different parts in them. Then you're going to divide those down the middle because now you've got a guideline. You've got the middle of the X that will guide those. And then you have 12 in each of these sections. And if you multiply all those out, you have 48 on the entire thing because you're dividing each one of these into 12 triangles. So now you've got 48 to work with. One of your eggs, whichever is the worst, dedicate that one to just practicing lines because this is hard to get used to. It's hard to try to figure out how to get the kids to write evenly. And I say write instead of draw because you write a design. You don't draw it apparently in the world of Paesanqui. And by the way, Paesanka is a single egg and Paesanqui is plural if you ever needed to know that trivia. But I'm using the large kitska here and I'm deliberately doing it badly because I want to show you something that if you end up with eggs that are really bad like this one's going to be, I'm going to turn it into something beautiful. So hang tight. Don't give up on yourself if you don't succeed at first. If anybody's ever wondered if there's something Sandy cannot do, this is it. This is really hard. I've been, I don't know, I think I've made 36 eggs in the last couple of weeks and I'm only just starting to get better in tomorrow's video. You'll see one that's going to actually be more accomplished than this. But this one I wanted to deliberately do it badly so you can see that we can turn this into something good in the long run. So I've traced a whole section of the lines that I already drew in pencil with the big fat kitska. And I'm going to put polka dots in some of them and I'm going to put lines in others just to start practicing. And I recommend if you're going to try this, just practice that. Don't worry about like trying to make a finished egg because you're going to get disappointed. I nearly threw a couple eggs across the room because I was really mad. I got to the end of something and then I heated it and I blew it up and it exploded. And I was like, ah, but I had already bought all the stuff. So I decided I was going to pursue learning. I was just going to practice and enjoy the process. And there's something really nice about working with a candle. I felt very old school in doing it. There is some such thing as an electric kitska. And I decided I was just going to go old school with this. Now there's a big blobby there. That happens and it happened to me a lot when I got wax on the outside of the kitska. Because the wax when you when I put it in the way that I do because I can't figure out how to scoop it without the wax getting on the outside. I have to be careful that the wax doesn't hang over the edge because if the wax is on the outside of it, it's just going to blob on you. So I decided that's fine. I'm going to let this whole section be just just a terrible bit of writing so that we can compare it to doing it a little bit better. And a little bit better in this particular case meant using the middle size of the three kitskas. It definitely worked better. And the big one I tended to save when I'm going to do a large area as opposed to doing the drawing. But at first I used the big one because I thought, yeah, I'm new at this. I need to just do nice big fat lines. And my eyes are getting bad. So it's easier to see big fat lines. But look how much nicer it happened when I started actually working with something smaller. So I did end up going back and forth over some of the lines because I can't, I mean, I'm still struggling with how to get the wax consistently to come out of the kitska and not run short or not blob. But what I did find is that this 48 triangle design allows me to just make lines that are the length of that triangle. I don't have to go across the entire thing in one fell swoop. There's a wonderful Ukrainian lady who I've watched a bunch of her videos. And she just says, oh, all you beginner people, you just need to learn how to make one stroke instead of making sketchy lines. Well, I make sketchy lines. That's how I draw. So I was really struggling with this. But on this egg, I just practiced all different kinds of lines. And that's what I recommend you do if you're going to take this on, especially if you're not going to have a Ukrainian grandma standing over you to tell you what to do because that is truly what I need. I need someone to tell me what I'm doing wrong. And I'm sure any of you in the comments who already know what I'm going to do wrong, you might be seeing me make mistakes. Please feel free to correct me, but just do it with love and kindness because I'm having fun with this anyway. Now this is a little bit out of focus, but you can see there's just wax all over this egg. And in some places it looks better than in others. But now I'm going to adapt the 48 triangle pattern so that I can make other patterns and not use triangles everywhere. I noticed that there were two distinct crisscross patterns that were made. One is diamond shapes all over the egg. The other is hexagon shapes. And there's four of those. There's all kinds of diamonds everywhere. So what I have done is in the patterns that I've created is chosen something to be in the hexagon. And sometimes I do two of the hexagons and sometimes I do all four of them. Here I'm doing a large flower into those. Anywhere where I have that many lines crisscrossing, it's a bigger shape and it's also going to be repeatable because I have several of those around the egg in the same equidistant part from each other. And then in the places where there's less lines crisscrossing each other, I'm going to make a flower that looks a little bit like an asterisk just by putting lines in there. Now some of them I'll adjust a little bit based on whether my lines were quite straight. You can move a flower over and that sort of thing but it gives you at least a start to the full pattern. I'm going to take a momentary break to talk about plugging the drain holes because if you die the inside of the egg it could leach up into the outside and you don't want that. So you want them plugged. You can start by just going around the edge of the hole and going around and around and let it cool and then put another layer or you could do what I do which is to get some wax deliberately on the outside of the kids gun. Remember how it blobbed earlier and then just tap it into the hole and it fills it right in. I figured that out and was very happy. I could plug my drain holes quickly and then I'm just going to fill in the rest if there's any places where I missed a flower, that sort of thing. I'm going to make sure I got my top and bottom so I have my design all complete. Make sure everything is the way you want and then we're going to etch the egg. You can etch it with actual acid. There's lots of different things you can use but there was a lady who showed how to do it with toilet bowl cleaner. So I decided I could get toilet bowl cleaner because I needed to get some anyway and I could use some for this project. So I put it into a jar and experimented around with dipping eggs into this. Now, you're going to want gloves on because there's some acid in this cleaner. This is the brand she said. I don't know if you could use others. I didn't try any others. So I have a glove on one hand because I'm going to use a tool in the other hand. You can see how it's kind of eating away at the poor egg. I kind of wonder like what's going on inside my poor toilet. It's just getting eaten away by this acid. You can just watch it boil. It's really wild. Now, you can do these in five minutes. You can do them in 15 minutes. I found I got better results from 15 minutes as well. The lady who showed how to do this in her video scrubbed it with a toothbrush which I guess activates it more and then I would dip it and scrub it with a toothbrush and I got better traction when I did this for about 15 minutes straight. So it is a little time intensive to do that but you'll just dip it, scrub it, any time you want it to stop then you take it to the sink and run it under clean water and wash it off and that will stop the etching. And you want to make sure you get it rinsed really well and then you're going to be ready to remove the wax. Be sure you poke the drain holes open. It doesn't have to be completely open. You just need to have some air able to get through because they make a really loud pop when they explode if you don't do that. Yeah, I did that a few times because I forgot all the steps in between. The traditional way to melt wax is by using a candle. You hold the wax next to the flame not in the flame, not above the flame because you don't want to burn it get a burn mark on it or you could use a hairdryer you could use a heat gun like I'm using here and the egg will get very hot to the touch. So be careful of that be careful of your fingers. I used a baby wipe because it also served to cool it down just a little tiny bit while I was working on this process. With these white eggs that are etched you can burn them with the heat gun so don't get it too close don't burn in one place or heat in one place for too long. This one was a lot harder to get the wax off of because it had all those little nooks and crannies to get into. So with that you can also use mineral spirits that will get the wax off. If you want to re-plug your drain hole on a white egg you can easily do that by filling it with some Elmer's glue. You might need to do it a couple times to get it to cover and stay there let it dry in between and then preserve your creations you can do that with some kind of lacquer you can do that with a spray or a paint on lacquer you can also use some clear nail polish so this is the egg that I created and I left one hole on the bottom because what I did after I got the whole thing glazed with that, you know, something sticky that has to dry I put it on skewers and put that in a foam thingy so that they could all have whole little trees of my eggs so they would all be drying. Now this is the really weird ugly egg and you know the weird ugly side didn't look all that bad the bad thing about this is I put my finger through it so be careful the etching makes the egg thinner so just be real delicate with these and don't squeeze them this is another one that I made and it had just kind of crazy swirls all over the place and I had one seam that I drew with the kitska all the way around but the rest of it was just like wild crazy lines and this one was so pretty I had it attached for like 20 minutes and I just did four big sunflowers in the four big hexagons and then filled in with random flowers everywhere else and it just came out so pretty and I did another one with a sunflower in the middle and just did polka dots around the outside edges with just a vine I guess you could call it down the seam and they all came out so so pretty I love them when they're shiny so make sure you do put some epoxy on them because they're beautiful this is another one that I tried early on and I only did it for like five minutes and you can see that it's not very deeply etched so the longer you leave your etching it makes it more delicate so you could put your finger through it but it also makes it nicer this one the thing came out really beautiful and I decided I was going to try to dye it I also was trying to put holes in the centers of the flowers with my Dremel not to be a goofball idea so I decided to dye it and it came out weird I didn't like that so much and I also broke it I have a crack in it because I dropped it in the sink in tomorrow's video I'm going to be talking about adding color to eggs we're just going to make one of these eggs on camera the rest of them I will show you though and you'll get to hear the sad story of one egg that died because I dropped it I will see you tomorrow not then have a wonderful Easter bye bye