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| photo by Bill Slavin |
Our garden burst with color this year. I'm puzzled because our winter has been so dry. One big rainstorm in December and little else since. The garden seems to have ignored the lack of water and is celebrating with the rest of us the return of Spring, renewed life, and glorious weather. In the Northern Hemisphere, color is everywhere.
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| photo by Bill Slavin |
As I walked by the dining table, I saw Bill's basket of pillboxes all in pastel colors. I felt the memory return of a basket of softly colored Easter eggs and the fun of dyeing them for the holiday.
My sister Linda and I dyed eggs the day before Easter. My mom would hard cook a dozen and set them to cool. While we waited for the eggs, Linda and I emptied the pellets from the PAAS egg dyeing kit into separate glass bowls filled with vinegar and watched the chemical reaction as the tablets dissolved. We sat around our dinette table with its metal tube legs and a yellow top that was imperious to anything we splashed on it. We drew on the eggs with white crayons to create hidden designs that would only appear when we dipped the eggs into the dye. We rolled the eggs over and over again in the dye to make the colors intense. Sometimes we dyed only a part of the egg in one color, then dipped the egg into another color to create different hues. Ours were not the perfect creations done by Ukrainian pysanky artists, but we kept busy trying to make our best ones.
On Easter Sunday, we woke up to search the house for the eggs that the Easter Bunny had hidden. The Easter Bunny, rooted in old pagan stories, the festival of Eostre, and celebrations of fertility, has connected with the traditions of Christianity because of the Spring season of rebirth. Eventually, my sister and I became the hiders of the eggs for our older sister's children. Our mom would make deviled eggs from the discovered dyed eggs to serve at our holiday dinner.
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| Deviled eggs, a favorite of Craft Day participants, made by Terri Waterman |
Many other cultures celebrate Spring, often with bright colors. People in India fling intensely colored powders at each other to celebrate the Hindu Holi Festival. What fun to abandon all reserve to cover each other in colored powder, especially this year.
In April in Thailand, the Songkran Water Festival takes place, without colorful props, to celebrate their new year. People use spray guns, hoses, and buckets to dunk others with water. With temperatures close to 100 degrees in April, the water comes as a welcome relief.
Nowruz in Iran celebrates new life (No=New, Rouz=Day) with a thorough house cleaning. Donning brightly colored clothes, celebrants set bonfires and gather for family get-togethers.
The Spring Equinox is celebrated in Mexico with thousands of people dressed in white who scale the Teotihuacan Pyramid to soak in its energy for the year.
With two years of pandemic life behind us, we seem to be celebrating this year's festivals and traditions with more intensity and more color. Even our gardens are celebrating!
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| photo by Bill Slavin |
Are you like me concerned about the number of books being banned in community libraries across our country? Write a letter to your representatives. Here's a link to help:
Color! Martha, have you ever painted on fabric? I've been obsessed lately (or is it for-ever) with Japanese Koibori flags and found a source for paint your own blanks. The outlines are there, but I'm not sure what paint to use that would be colorfast outdoors? I got a small set of paint markers from Blick, but not sure they'll work to cover large areas of synthetic "satin".
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