I'm revising my original opinion on Dye-Na-Flow. Originally I thought it would be very useful; after playing with it some more I now feel it has limited use. It's just too watery -- it slips and slides all over the egg, dripping down the sides whenever I try to fill an area larger than a penny. The only alternative is to wait for it to dry, and then end up with a hard edge. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- it's what happened to the egg on the left -- but it doesn't quite give me the control I need.

  

This egg was another Dye-Na-Flow experiment. I thought I would try the 'puppy training pad' technique and see how intense the colors became. Sadly they LOST intensity and weren't very nice at all. The pictures at left show the front and back of the egg after the process (the back is actually more informative). The image on the right shows the egg after a second training pad session, this time using coloring crystals. I just wish the coloring crystals weren't so fugitive!! I'm always worried about their light-fastness, which is one reason I can't bring myself to sell my eggs. It would be different if I could bring myself to varnish them, but I don't like what varnishing can do to my finishes.

"No Egg Left Behind" continues, with dismal results. I think. Is it better to have dyed and lost than never to have dyed at all? I've cracked two eggs this evening, bringing my weekly total to THREE. Some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed.

I tried to bleach an egg, something I've always had indifferent results with. Admittedly this was probably the LAST egg I should try bleaching. It was a black, red, and yellow egg I had already finished, inspired by some of Klimt's work. It was a very failed attempt, and I had been ignoring the egg for about a year. But as part of this new initiative I pulled it out of a carton and waxed a new design on it. Then I bleached it, using a Clorox Bleach Pen as I realized at the last second that I didn't have any normal bleach in the house.

The bleach pen worked well -- I liked the consistency and convenience of the bleach gel, and I also liked scrubbing at the egg with my electric toothbrush to speed things up a tad. The egg was bleaching beautifully, except over the areas I had previously waxed, which is to be expected. I managed to fade those areas out considerably, and felt confident that the black design would be the obvious centerpiece, not the faded red disks.

Then tragedy struck, in the form of a cat named Squeak. The egg left its safe egg-rest and went spinning across the kitchen where it painfully smashed into the refrigerator. Amazingly it was still in one piece, but with a million tiny crack lines throughout the surface.

I decided to remove the wax, just to see what would have been. And I'm sorry I did -- it wasn't pretty at all. My sooty black wax melted across the egg, leaving a dark stain I'll probably never be able to remove.

So now I know -- skip the bleach pen and instead submerge the egg in a bleach bath where the cat won't touch it. And use clear wax, and hopefully CHIP it off instead of melting.

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Other neat things -- I'm playing with Pearl-Ex on a single egg, trying to convince myself that a resist is a resist, and it doesn't matter if I wax it or paint it. I'm also reaching the end of the three dozen eggs I bought to Rachel's, so I'll have to dye more shortly. I also bought my egg journals from home, so I can work more on retroactively entering information. I was going to try to secure a house and a mortgage over Spring Break, but I know my priorities! Neon dye and egg blowers are very near the top.

I've joined an online egging group, this one sponsored by Yahoo! Groups. I enjoyed the group I was part of in the mid-90s. This looks to be a much larger group -- over 200 members -- while the group I was part of had maybe 30 members. I've started a tip notebook where I can print up the tips I find most useful. While it's nice to have digital information nothing really beats information at your fingertips.

Today I actually ran out of coloring crystals. I can't believe it!! Thank goodness it's Easter. I ran over to Albertson's and bought the cheapest kits they had. They also had one of the Ruby's swirl kits, which I haven't seen in years. I -know- it's a messy, unreliable kit, but I bought it anyway. The photos on the packaging and the neat plastic vials got me right in the nostalgia. I always wanted this kit growing up, and was never allowed to purchase it -- waaaaaay to messy for my mother.

I'm in the middle of a new initiative called "No Egg Left Behind," where I'm trying to salvage eggs I considered failures. I'm trying all sorts of techniques -- paint and Pearl-Ex over the egg, re-dying, Fantastic and bleach, you name it. Some of the eggs are doing beautiful things the second time around. Check out these reconditioned favorites:



This egg started out as an experiment using dye crayons. You can still see the darkest crayon lines running horizontally across the egg. After crayoning it and heat-fixing the crayon I waxed it, and dyed it this unfathomable red shade. I don't know why I chose such an unhappy color combination. The poor egg has been in a carton for about a year. I took it out and sprayed it with Fantastik to remove some of the color, then waxed right over the existing pattern and dunked it in aubergine dye. The result is much more eye-pleasing.