About the eggs.

I carve eggs.  I paint them too. Then I sell them. I’d like you to buy them. Then I get to do fun things like buy groceries and hair dye.

I have been a creative professional my entire adult life, and  I have marginally interesting and fancy degrees in various creative disciplines.  But to be entirely honest, most things I’ve taken on have come from looking at a thing and going “Well, I wonder how you do that….”  and then just going out and doing whatever that is. That’s how the eggs started. I saw a photo online and thought “Hey, I bet I could do that.” and so I did.

Here’s some answers to questions I get asked a lot:

– Are they real eggs?

Yes. Generally I use chicken eggs.  You know, from my refrigerator. They might be large, extra large, or jumbo. It depends on what I bought at the store.

Why don’t you use larger eggs (like ostrich, for example.)?

Because I don’t keep ostrich eggs in my refrigerator.  I know this sounds simplistic but an ostrich egg is about the same as 32 large chicken eggs. I don’t have any way to effectively use that much egg at once, and don’t have the freezer space to make that many egg cubes(did you know you can make egg cubes? You can! and then you just defrost them one cube at a time for recipes.) and still be able to store things like food and ice.  I prefer not to be wasteful with food.

Although you can get layered effects from ostrich eggs you can’t get from chicken eggs due to shell thickness,  chicken eggs are more fragile and take a more delicate approach to carving. It’s actually harder to carve a chicken egg.  It’s a very minor superpower.  Sadly, I can’t do anything truly useful, like teleport, or make instantaneous grilled cheese sandwiches. I need ten minutes for the sandwiches.

Yes I am aware I can buy already empty ostrich eggs.  I know.  But then I don’t have eggs to make egg based things to eat.  It just sort of misses the point.

Do they sometimes break on you?

Yep. Very often on the very last bit of carving.  The more material you remove from the shell the more fragile they become. That last hole is tricky.

– Can you make (whatever complicated pattern you’re about to suggest)?

Maybe. Some ideas work better than others.

– Can you make (whatever colors you’re about to  suggest.)?

Yes.  But if what you’re about to suggest is an egg with a black interior, be aware that I have to charge extra for it.  Why? Science.  In order to get the interior of the egg black it needs a lot of time in the dye bath.  The reason that egg dyeing works is because of the acid in the dye mixture, which eats away at the shell and makes it more porous.  To get a nice black on the interior, the egg you wind up with is so thin and fragile, it’s far more likely to collapse before it’s finished being painted.  When black eggs collapse they don’t really break, so much as *poof* into a small pile of black dust in your hands, like something from a cartoon.  Generally you wind up spending a lot more time on the black ones because you have to work much more slowly, and time is money in the end.

– How long does it take to make one?

There are too many variables to answer this question effectively. The fastest I’ve done one is 72 hours. Usually they take about a week assuming I don’t break a ton of them in the process.  However, if I’m being asked to replicate something from a photo, the time it takes to create one astronomically increases, and we’re looking at weeks at a time.  It’s very hard to replicate things from photos at that scale, on a curved surface. I can do it, but I don’t love doing it and the time it takes makes the end result really expensive.

-Aren’t you worried about an egg breaking in shipping?

No.  I have never had one break in shipping that went into transit properly packaged by me. (I did give a friend on vacation one once, and it broke on the way back to Europe. But it wasn’t packed for transit by me, since they’d opened it to look at it first.)

– Can you ship to (insert place name here.) ?


Can I get one unpainted?

Yes.  But if you want it dyed, Im going to insist on a sealant to protect the egg.  Once you dye it, you need something to protect its structural integrity if you want it to last any length of time. Dyeing weakens the shell. That’s how it works, scientifically.

How do you make them?

I have been asked this so many times I’ve planned on making a video tutorial to show people how it’s done.  It’s not a secret.  But it means I have to get around to filming the tutorial and my overwhelming reluctance to being filmed and put on youtube. Eventually, I’ll get around to it. Probably.

Have your cats ever broken one you were working on?

Yes.  Amazingly, Rupert is still alive, but this is mostly because he broke the most valuable object in the house when he was six months old.  (I mean it.)  After that it was all downhill and a nearly finished egg seems pretty mild by comparison

I hate talking to people, but I want to buy an egg. Do you have an etsy store?


Any other questions? Just ask.

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