Burgess, who recently retired from teaching art at David Douglas High School, learned about Ukrainian eggs from a friend more than 20 years ago. She has taught the wax resist method -- covering an area with wax to resist color -- to her students and in workshops.
The decorated eggs, called pysanky from a Ukrainian word meaning "to write," have been associated with Easter for centuries. However, archaeologists have found decorated ceramic eggs that are more than 3,000 years old, indicating the art is pre-Christian, Burgess said. Traditional designs including stars, stags, wheat and fir trees are found in the Trypillian culture that flourished about 6,000 years ago in the area we now know as Ukraine.
She lights a candle and scoops beeswax into a kistka, a tool with a tiny funnel on a stick. She warms the filled kistka funnel at the candle flame, then plugs the hole in the shell with wax to keep moisture out of the interior. Next, she "draws" wax lines over the star outline with the refilled kistka, marking areas not to be dyed.
After the yellow dye, Burgess uses wax to "draw" a flower design inside the central star, which will preserve yellow petals on the shell. After each color, she applies another wax design or covering to preserve a portion of that color. She waxes a large area of the egg after the red coloring, then dips it in the black dye.
The next step is carefully warming the waxed shell at the candle flame and wiping off the wax with an absorbent paper towel. When she has several decorated shells, she said, "I dip them in polyurethane. That makes them shine."
She once decorated an ostrich egg but turned down an emu egg. "They're too dark and leathery for the wax resist method," she said.