Of Threads, Sticks, And Eggs

Lanuage camp, it's not just for language anymore. I may have mentioned that at the recent Language Refresher, they offered us some optional classes on Ukrainian arts and crafts. The classes were an hour usually, sometimes two and you only had to do one a night for three days. You could do the same one three times or you could go to many different ones. They were pretty varied in the subjects. You could learn traditional Ukrainian dancing, Ukrainian card games, making little figurines with flour and salt, or canning and jarring. Or watch Ukrainian movies and discuss Ukrainian poetry. I chose to learn embroidery and krashinka. I also learned an outdoor game. I had heard good things about the knitting classes taught at the winter language refresher and thought that I wouldn't actually mind learning the basics of knitting. I mean, El knits. And it does look relaxing, even though I always figured I had not the patience to finish any project I started. With the choices put to me of knitting or cross-stitch, I decided to go with the cross-stitch. It literally only took a few minutes to learn the basics and she had us stitching our patterns in no time. I am really slow and know there are some things that I will need to ask people how to do it for help before I am finished. I really hope that I can work on it during my time here.

 Blakely and I learning the basics

 Teacher helping me fix some problems

After my embroidery class, I was walking outside and ran into some volunteers playing a game called Garad-kee. It reminded me of Bocci meets (maybe) horseshoes. There was an actual court for this game (like a shuffleboard court) and the way it works is that you have five pegs each about 5 inches long. You arrange the pegs into predetermined patterns. I think there are 15 different arrangements. Then you stand about 10 meters from the pegs and you throw a wooden pole that is about 4 feet long at the pile, trying to knock them out of the square. Once the pattern is hit for the first time, you move up to a line that is 5 meters from the pegs, trying in successive throws to knock all pegs out of the square. If the thrown stick hits the ground before hitting the square then there is a two peg penalty and they are added to the square to additionally be knocked out. Once all pegs have been knocked out of the square, you start again with the next pattern until 15 patterns have been knocked down and out. Easy to understand, difficult to master. The poles give you splinters, and accuracy when hurling a stick is quite difficult. It was fun though. [Sorry no photos]
The last thing I learned was krasinka which is a traditional method of easter egg decoration. Our teacher, Volodya, showed us everything and we each did an egg. You start with an egg and a big sewing needle. You poke a small hole in both ends, using the needle to pierce and scramble the yolk, then you use your mouth to blow the raw egg out of the end. Then rub the egg with vinegar to remove hand oils and dirt from the shell. Next, we used a candle and an instrument that looked like a dental pick with a little resevoir. We melted beeswax in the resevoir over the candle and sealed the ends of our eggs to prevent the dye from filling the shell. You then draw a design on your egg using a pencil. Next, you melt more wax and apply it to the shell ONLY in the place that you want the shell to remain white. Then you have your dye jars. You arrange the dyes in order from lightest to darkest submerging the egg for two minutes in yellow (our lightest). When you pull it out, you use more wax to cover ONLY in the place you want yellow (remember white is already covered). Then you dip into your next darkest color, like red, drying and covering with wax ONLY what will remain red. Repeating until you have all of the colors you want. Then when you are all done you get a cloth rag, relight the candle and start waving the egg close to the candle to melt the wax, wipe wax off with rag, repeat until all of wax has been removed revealing all of your colors as it is wiped away. Some of the others' eggs came out really nice, especially for their first time doing it, and mine, well, it wasn't going to win any awards, but at least I understood the mechanics of the job. And I was told that the people in the Peace Corps office immediately identified this one as mine.

 

Can you guess which one was mine??

 

 Melting the wax

 Applying the wax

 Looking on while Amanda submerges our eggs in blue dye

What the finished products look like. Some can be extremely detailed and beautiful.

All of this stuff was fun for us. Learning traditional Ukrainian pasttimes that we may not have seen at our sites. Our teacher offered us to keep our eggs, but I knew there was no realistic expectation that it would survive the train and bus ride home. He said he would add them to the collection in the Peace Corps office. It certainly would be funny to see mine strung up the next time I am up there.