The shell in question is believed to be either a goose or a duck egg. Looking at the wax and dye patterns, it appears to have been decorated with a single dip -- areas that were not covered by wax all appear to be the same shade. To date, I have seen no information indicating what the original dye material was. The design itself is a traditional pattern referred to as "Black Sea."
With close to a dozen excited friends sending me links to the find, I just HAD to reproduce it. At the time, I had neither duck nor goose eggs in hand, so I worked with chicken eggs. My tool kit was as usual: a household candle for a heat source, a lump of beeswax to lay down lines, and a traditional kistka, a copper cone wire-wrapped to a small dowel. And for dyestuffs, I decided to try a material that would have been readily available in period.
My first attempt was made with beet juice and macerated beets as the dye, but I added too much vinegar. This gave me a lovely pale pink -- and acid-etched a considerable percentage of the eggshell itself, leaving a fine white film in the bottle of the jar of dye.
It was pretty ...
... Until it rubbed right off with the wax. But the etched effect WAS kind of nifty.
Time to start over, and pick another readily-available dyestuff.
Fortunately, my local grocery store is used to me. The stockers are all used to seeing me candle eggshells before I buy them. And the late-night clerk didn't bat an eye when I went to the produce section and filled a bag with yellow onion skins -- and no onions.
At home, I crammed as many skins as I could into a small saucepan, with about a cup and a quarter of water. I simmered them until I got a good golden-brown color, then removed the pan from the water, strained it, and let it cool in a wide-mouthed jar. While it cooled, I laid down wax on a new shell. Once the dye was cool, I added about a tablespoon of vinegar and stirred it in. Since I had emptied the shell, I plugged the hole in the bottom, and weighted the shell down with a smaller glass jar, crossed my fingers, and went to bed.
The next morning, I extracted the shell from the dye bath, lit my candle again and removed the wax. This time, it was a success!
Chicken egg and yellow onionskin, left overnight
While the "Black Sea" pattern can be filled in a number of ways, the Lviv shell features fairly large-scale hatch marks through half the space -- a simple fill. The shell took up the dye beautifully, too.
