So Jeo LeBlond’s first experimentation with the ancient Slavic tradition of egg decorating wasn’t exactly inspiring.
“I just didn’t have a clue what I was doing. They turned out scratchy and blotchy,” the self-taught artist says. “It was a little disappointing.”
LeBlond was only 10 or 12 years old at the time.
Getting a craft project for Christmas that could keep her busy over the holidays was a tradition in her Pictou County, N.S., family. That year, one of her three older brothers gave her a simple kit to make pysanky, derived from the Ukrainian verb pysaty, to write.
“When I was really little, I remember seeing some kind of segment, it must have been CBC, with Ukrainian women making them,” says LeBlond. “It was intriguing.”
The process is painstaking. Through pinholes in the top and bottom, each egg, typically turkey, goose, rhea or ostrich, is emptied of its contents then waxed, etched, and dyed layer upon layer. Once dry, the beeswax is melted off with a candle to reveal an intricate pattern. The eggs are then varnished for protection and preservation.
Though now known as Ukrainian Easter eggs, pysanky dates back well before Christian times and, according to folklore, the elaborately decorated eggs were thought to have special powers to ward off evil. In Christian times, they became a symbol of rebirth.
After that first experience making them herself, LeBlond didn’t try again until 2007, when she had two children of her own, a four year old daughter and a son aged two.
“I started getting interested in it again because I wanted to try out a new craft project with the kids,” she says. “I did some research online and bought all the stuff to make the eggs.”
With vats of colourful dyes, an open flame and hot wax, she realized pretty quickly that her kids were too little. So she set up a little desk in her bedroom and began working on the eggs herself.
This new pastime helped fill the evening hours while her husband Paul LeBlond, a welder, was out of the province for work, and her children were tucked in bed.
Pretty soon she was hooked.
“I realized that people actually like to collect these and it was a way of expressing my artistic side,” she says. “I did a whole bunch of research, bought a whole bunch of books on how to do it and the different kinds of designs and joined different online groups.”
As her kids got older, LeBlond took over their toy room in the back of the family’s old farmhouse in the village of Scotsburn in rural Pictou County and turned it into her studio.
Every available space in the small, sunlit room is jampacked with a well-organized assortment of eggs, dyes, equipment and other supplies. She orders in her eggs by the dozen, some already empty, others not. While some pysanky artists work with wooden egg shapes, the traditional method is to use real eggs.
Creating the art eggs can take LeBlond a few days or a month, depending on the size of the egg and whether it’s a new design she’s come up with, or if she’s replicating one of her earlier efforts, or if she adds goldleaf.
“When I first started out, I would make each egg one at a time,” she says. “But now I make them in batches. It’s faster because they are all approximately the same size, so you have the same measurements. There’s a lot of measuring, marking and dividing and you want everything to be evenly spaced. Then there’s picking out the dyes and which order you do the dyes in. I’m really bad at writing stuff down when I do things. If you’re doing it all at once, you don’t have to try to remember how you did it, over and over.”
LeBlond sometimes incorporates traditional pysanky symbols, but likes to come up with her own designs, with nature one of her greatest inspirations.
There isn’t much appetite for buying the intricate eggs here at local farmers markets or craft fairs, so LeBlond sells her creations online, mainly through Etsy at her shop Pysanky by So Jeo. Some go to customers in Western Canada and Ontario, others to Australia, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland, but most to American collectors.
“Collecting eggs is really big in the States,” she says. “But I also have customers that just have an appreciation for things that are handmade and that take dedication.”
She’ll soon be starting a commission for a U.S. customer that’s been on the back burner for a couple of years as she works through a backlog of orders: a “tree of life” design on an egg from a rhea (a large, flightless bird similar to an ostrich).
“On my Etsy store, I had to take my listings down because I was just getting too many commissions,” she says. “The ones I now have available in my store are left over from the batch that I made for a commission.”
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, LeBlond has held raffles for the month of April for the past two years to raise money for humanitarian aid.
“The prizes were my eggs, gift certificates to my Etsy shop and a few egg decorating kits that I had purchased while at Pysanky Toronto last year,” she says. “About $37,000 was raised over these two months and I will most likely do another this year …
“It was crazy the first year, $27,000, when the war had just started, but as time goes on people’s interest wanes,” she adds. “Last year it was $10,000 and this year will probably be less, but I am hopeful. It is a way of giving respect to the people and their art form.”
She also donated prizes for last year’s Pysanky Toronto, where artists come together worldwide to meet, take courses and learn new skills and types of egg decorating. “Funds raised during these retreats go to support pysanky artists in Ukraine,” LeBlond says.
Meanwhile, she’s also whittling down her commission list.
“I’m not as fanatical as I used to be. I don’t stay up all night,” she says. “I have very patient customers.”
While she might have slowed down a bit, she has no plans to give up pysanky. She has also made pysanky jewellery in the past and would like to start doing so again.
“I can’t imagine doing anything else,” she says.