Apr 25, 2011

In Roseville, Keeping Ukrainian Folk Art Of Intricately Painted Eggs Alive WorldwideBy Maja BeckstromTwinCities.com

Luba Perchyshyn swiftly and surely traces a black line of wax against the white curve of an egg. At 87, she is only a bit slower than she was decades ago.

“I’m getting older, but I can still do it,” she says with a smile, as she rests her elbows on her worktable and steadies the egg in the palm of her hand.

Perchyshyn has been making these intricately embellished, jewel-toned eggs since childhood. She learned the Ukrainian tradition from her mother, and her family continues to spread the folk art through their shop in Roseville, which sells Ukrainian eggs and supplies around the world.

“I have no idea how many I’ve made. Thousands and thousands, maybe a million?” she says. “I do it for the business, but I do it for love, too, because I love making them.”

In the busy days before Easter, Perchyshyn and colleague Halyna Bryn sit at a worktable in the rear of the Ukrainian Gift Shop, on Fairview Avenue, amid the smell of warm beeswax. The word for the decorated eggs — pysanky — comes from the Ukrainian word “to write.” The women say they do not decorate, but rather “write” the eggs, using a metal funnel on a stick to lay precise lines of melted wax. Each layer of wax protects the color beneath as the egg is dipped in a series of increasingly darker dyes.

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