𓆣 Easter Eggs

This year for Easter, I decided that I would attempt to use the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph, hpr, ( or 𓆣  ) on dyed eggs.  Hpr is an ideogram of a dung-beetle, and is used in words like "manifest" and "becoming."    In ancient Egyptian iconography, the dung-beetle is shown with a sun disk, and is symbolically related to the beginning of a new day and regeneration.  I used photos I'd taken of various ancient Egyptian artifacts as the basis for the design and fired up Inkscape.  Several hours later, I had a DFX file that I could import into Silhouette.  

In the past, I've used painter's tape on eggs to resist the dyes.  I purchased a one inch wide roll, the widest I could find.  I thought I might be pushing the limits of the cutter-plotter's ability to incise the tape without shredding it, but it turned out that that wasn't a problem.  Also, if the tape was too wide, there would have had difficulty applying it evenly to the curved surface of the eggs.

I shrunk down the design, placed a strip of the tape on an older Silhouette mat that had lost some of its stickiness, and set the software for washi paper.  Moments later I had a flawless cut (beginner's luck) of the hpr hieroglyph, and I laughed with a crafter's glee.

While I was at it, I had the cutter-plotter cut out some painter's tape stars.  If I had been thinking, I would have made them duat, or netherworld, stars, (𓇽 ) but they were plain, regular ones.     I also cut out two larger beetles out of 3x5 index cards with a vague notion that they might be able to roll the eggs like their live counterparts will roll dung balls.  

After that, it was a matter of setting up the dye from a kit and dunking eggs.  Neither Mark nor The Child were really into the process, although Mark was interested in natural dyes and tried out onion skins and some Earl Grey tea as dyes.  

The most difficult part was waiting for the eggs, and more importantly, the painter's tape, to dry so that there wouldn't be smudges.  There were some places where the tape had buckled a bit:  worst-case they made some smudged boundaries; best-case there was a kind of marbling effect in some of the stars.  

Next time I will re-work the wing-case design to simplify it and make it less of a T-shape and more of a Y-shape.  It might be possible to stencil a short word or phrase and have it wrapped around the widest part of the egg.  

The eggs were received well (at least on social media) and added to the decor of my folks' Easter table.