Leya and her older sister, Shay, had a blast decorating Easter eggs at the Lloydminster Museum and Archives on Sunday afternoon as part of Easter Pysanky festivities. Taylor Weaver Meridian Source
It was a sea of colour at the Lloydminster Museum and Archives as Border City residents of all ages got in the Easter spirit with dip-dyed and traditional Pysanky eggs.
Kids ages three to eight had the opportunity to dip-dye and decorate hard-boiled eggs, and anyone over the age of nine was able to use the traditional kistka tool and create unique Pysanka.
“Pysanky is the traditional Ukrainian Easter egg,” said Beth Bernard, events planner at the Lloydminster Museum and Archives. “It’s an art form that’s been around for something like 1,500 years; they’ve been doing it for a very, very long time.
“With Pysanky, it’s basically a wax-resist technique,” she added.
“You use a special tool called a kistka and you layer beeswax over the dye, so it’s a beeswax layer, then a dye layer, a beeswax layer, a dye layer.
“At the end, you take all of that wax off of your egg and all of the different colours underneath are revealed.”
Bernard also noted traffic throughout the event was pretty consistent, with the majority of pre-registered spots filled.
“We’ll probably have about 200 eggs painted by the time we’re done today,” she said.
“It’s a fun event for the kids, and we actually have a craft going on in the permanent gallery right now, and there’s also an Easter egg scavenger hunt, and we’re doing an egg guess. Kids get to guess the number of chocolate eggs in a glass jar, and the right guess wins the jar of eggs and a giant stuffy.”
With a lot of Ukrainian history in the area, Bernard explained Easter Pysanky has been a long-standing tradition at Easter time and encourages anyone who hasn’t to come and try it next year.
“This is just a fun event for people to come and try the art form out,” she said. “The eggs have been coming out great, the kids have been making amazing eggs.”
