The 89-year-old Altoona resident carries on the Ukrainian tradition of pysanky — the art of creating colorful, intricately detailed Easter eggs that are considered keepsakes to all who are lucky enough to have them.

Nazaruk, whose parents and in-laws emigrated from the Ukraine in the 1900s, said she makes the eggs every year, starting weeks before Easter, oftentimes in February.

This year, as Russia wages war on Ukraine, she feels it’s even more important to remember and carry on Ukrainian folk traditions.

“I think it’s a wonderful art the Ukrainian people have, and no one else does it,” Nazaruk said, adding that she wants others to know about that country’s people and that they are fighting for not only their country, but their way of life and their heritage.

Vera Nazaruk of Altoona displays one of her pysanky Easter eggs, a craft she learned from her mother. Mirror photo by Holly Claycomb

In an effort to keep the tradition alive, over the years Nazaruk has taught the craft to not only her children, but to her grandchildren and others who have wanted to try their hand at the art.

It takes a lot of patience, as crafting just one egg can take several hours, depending on how detailed the design.

‘An egg is a funny thing’

Nazaruk said she can spend days on one egg, first drawing the design in pencil, then dipping the egg in the first of several colored dyes, using melted wax to preserve some colors at each level.

Getting started requires a perfect egg, though. She candles prospective eggs — uses a candle or flashlight held up close to the egg to look for any imperfections.

Once the eggs are ready to go, Nazaruk clears her kitchen table and sets up shop.

“Anyone who wants to eat has to move to the other side of the table,” she said with a laugh.

Her workshop includes a small lamp to eliminate any shadows, a pencil, beeswax, a Kistka — a stylus used to draw the design — and dye for the eggs.

Once an egg passes muster, she choses a design and gets her pencil ready.

But drawing a straight line can be a challenge.

Mirror photo by Holly Claycomb

“An egg is a funny thing,” she said. “They’re not flat, they’re not round.”

“The best I can do is a rubber band to follow to make perfect lines,” she said. Nazaruk likes wide rubber bands she can gently slip over the egg — rubber bands she finds in the produce aisle at the grocery store.

“I’ll see asparagus and I don’t even want asparagus but they have a wide rubber band,” she said. Of course she will eat the asparagus, because she won’t waste it, but she might only have wanted the ideal rubber band, she said. Nazaruk’s designs feature a lot of “gingerbread,” small details that merge to create the overall design. They also sport traditional Ukrainian symbols such as wheat, animals, crosses, netting and more.

Taking an egg from a blank canvas to a beautifully designed keepsake can take multiple hours over several days.

Sometimes she works two or three hours a day and then gives it a rest before starting fresh the next day.

Vera Nazaruk of Altoona decorates an egg in the Ukrainian tradition of pysanky in her kitchen. Mirror photo by Holly Claycomb

Granddaughter Kathryn Busch of Altoona said she also needs to take a break after a couple of hours of work on an egg.

Busch said she makes a handful of the eggs every year and can remember always watching her grandmother create them during the Lenten season.

Now 25, Busch said she enjoys the artistic aspect of creating the eggs herself, though her grandmother “is so much more advanced than me. She is the one with the talent.”

When she decided to learn the art, Busch said she sat in Nazaruk’s kitchen for a couple of hours and started with simple patterns.

“She told me to study pictures,” Busch said.

Mirror photo by Holly Claycomb

It took her a couple of eggs to get the hang of it, she admits.

Pysanky eggs are hollow — whether through natural drying or through blowing out the centers — with Nazaruk and Busch differing on how they achieve the hollow end result.

While Nazaruk usually creates and dyes a full egg and uses a small drill and bellows to hollow out the egg when it’s done, Busch said that is too nerve-wracking.

Instead, Busch hollows the egg out first then draws the design and dyes the piece so as not to break an egg after hours of work to create the art.

Nazaruk admits that it’s hard to toss an egg that’s been damaged after all the work that’s put into the piece.

She’s put raw, colored eggs up in a cupboard on a high shelf to let them naturally dry out. But, she warned, if they weren’t perfect and one had a crack, watch out.

“After a while, you’d wonder where the smell is coming from,” she said. “There is nothing worse than a rotten egg.”

All she could do was take it outside and throw it really, really far away, she said laughing.

Nazaruk said she doesn’t hollow out her eggs until she is done because it’s hard to keep a hollow egg in the dye.

For Busch, the hollow egg is safer, and she said the dyes used are more intense and stronger than the ones bought at a department store. “It doesn’t take as long for the dye to get into the egg,” she said.

Busch finds creating a design relaxing and said she is glad she learned the art.

“I grew up watching her do it,” she said of her grandmother. “To be able to do it myself is pretty cool.”

She also plans to pass the craft down to her children; she and her husband are currently expecting their first child, a girl.

Her daughter would be at least the fifth generation to create the eggs — that she knows of — though the tradition more than likely goes back many generations before her great-grandparents arrived in the United States.

Daughter-in-law Pamela Nazaruk said while she has a kit given to her by her mother-in-law, she doesn’t have the patience to work on the eggs.

“She’s really mastered it,” Pamela said. “I just sit and watch her.”

Pamela said Nazaruk taught her how to make some traditional food items, though.

“She taught me the perogies; I can do that,” she said, and those take hours to make, too.

“She keeps the traditions,” she said of her mother-in-law.

Carrying on traditions

Nazaruk said she thinks it’s important to carry on traditions, such as the pysanky eggs, especially in light of the war in Ukraine.

Her parents emigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s, then met and married in Scranton, she said. Most of their families perished in the Ukraine in 1933 when more than 3 million Ukrainians were starved to death by Joseph Stalin during a man-made famine.

Nazaruk said she sees history repeating itself today with Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

“They’re very nice, hard-working people,” she said of Ukrainians. “It’s a shame how they’re being murdered for no reason. They just want to be themselves.”

Ukrainians are also a stubborn people, something Nazaruk said her children say about her.

Pointing out the intricate designs in the pysanky eggs and in the hand-stitched, hand-embroidered designs in clothing, Nazaruk said, “Ukrainians like a challenge.”

This isn’t the first time Russia has tried to take them over and they’ve fought back, she said.

But she thinks the world is watching the war and forgetting about the individuals themselves.

“I was always impressed with their heritage,” she said. “I commend the Ukrainian people for being so stubborn.”

Nazaruk learned how to make pysanky eggs from her mother, she said. A neighbor had bees, so the family used beeswax, melting it in a jar lid and drawing the design using a pin dipped in the hot wax.

Growing up on a farm, Nazaruk said the family didn’t buy dye, either.

“We only had two colors,” she said. “We used crepe paper. … We’d soak it in water and squeeze it out for the dye.”

Even that could be considered an upgrade from the traditional dyes made of beets, onion skins and wood.

“They would improvise” to create various colors, she said of her Ukrainian ancestors.

Now, Nazaruk gets her dyes and other supplies from a Canadian company and she feels like she’s cheating because she uses an electric Kistka or stylus, which saves a lot of time.

A green thumb, too

When she’s not creating eggs, Nazaruk said she still gardens, though not as much as in years past.

Nazaruk and her husband, Maurice or “Morey,” owned a local grocery store before they both retired in 1996. Morey was a meat-cutter, she said, and owning a grocery store came in handy as they had six children.

After retirement, the couple had the opportunity to travel and also work on their garden, with Nazaruk canning tomatoes, juice, peppers and more.

With a grin, Nazaruk said Morey planted a lot in case it turned out to be “a bad year” for some of the produce.

He was a great man, she said, adding with good-humored laughter that he supported her Easter egg passion, too. “He would look over and say ‘that’s nice, what time is supper?'”

Morey passed away five years ago, after 62 years of marriage, Nazaruk said.

Each of the couple’s children have glass jars filled with pysanky eggs she made over the years and all of her children have watched her make the eggs and tried their hand at it — with some having more success than others.

The eggs are fragile and a light touch is needed, along with a lot of patience and a steady hand, she said.

“If you get it all done and then you slip and drop it … you learn to be very, very careful.”

Thinking backward is key

The process to create the pysanky eggs, simplified, consists of creating the design in pencil and then putting the wax on any part that should remain white, artist Vera Nazaruk of Logan Township said.

Then the egg is dipped in the first color, usually yellow. Once dry, hot wax is put on anything that should remain yellow or white. Then, the egg may be put in blue. Any yellow that also was dipped in blue turns green, Nazaruk said.

More wax is added, with the new wax covering what will remain green. And the egg is dipped into another color, maybe red.

At that point, “everything I want to remain red, I’ll put wax on,” she said.

The final step is dipping the egg in black.

Once pulled from the black dye and allowed to dry, the wax is melted off, revealing all the colors that create the final design. The parts of the egg that had no wax remain black, setting off the design even more.

Making a pysanky egg come out right requires backward thinking — meaning at all times Nazaruk has to remember which part of the egg she wants what color, because to keep it the correct color, she has to cover that area in wax before dipping it into the next color.

The wax prevents the new color from being absorbed into the egg in that location. She’s made mistakes in the past, especially if she set the egg aside for a while, she said.

“It’s complicated,” daughter-in-law Pamela Nazaruk said.

The elder Nazaruk said she has created pysanky eggs from large goose eggs to pullet eggs.

“They’re small and they’re cute,” she said of the tiny eggs, “but they’re hard to work on because they are so tiny.”

Once hollowed out, Nazaruk seals the drill hole with a tiny piece of cut off toothpick “and a dab of Gorilla glue.”

She then sprays the egg with a clear finish, which gives it a little more protection and a nice shine.

Courtesy photo Vera Nazaruk starts the egg design in pencil.

Courtesy photo The egg is then dipped in yellow.

Courtesy photo A blue layer is added, turning parts green.

Courtesy photo The egg is then dipped in red.

Courtesy photo The final step in the dying process is dipping the egg in black.

Courtesy photo The finished product, once the egg is hollowed out and the drill hole sealed. A clear finish adds protection and shine.