More Christmas Eggs

A hunting themed egg for my wilderness-addict father. I've been saving the little owl since high school. I guess it finally found it's place. It's hard to photograph the eggs. It is difficult to capture the detail on the outside and the inside while getting a close enough shot. This one has a moose, a cabin, moss and a night sky with snowflakes and stars.
One of my favorite eggs from when I was a child has a little church inside. So I decided to recreate it. This one turned out nice, but I have noticed that the quality and variation of the tiny things you can find these days just isn't the same as the things my auntes used years ago.
An egg (above) for one of the families I work for. This one has two little brown birds in a nest with a forest in the background and an orange butterfly perched on the outside.

The egg below I made for my little cousin in Alberta. She is totally into fish so I thought that I would make her a tiny aquarium inside the egg, like a Christmas fishbowl. This shot isn't good enough, the egg is decorated on the outside and the inside with fish, shells, rocks, seahorses, starfish and seaweed. I particularly like the way the pearls fit the theme.
Making these little egg decorations is a family tradition. My aunt Janet MacNaughton was an artist on Hornby Island and Maui and made everything from decorative tiles to stained glass windows. I don't know when she started making these eggs; sometime before I was born. At some point her daughter, my older cousin Aleisha picked up the craft and Janet also taught her younger sister, my aunt Kathie how to make them as well. As I was growing up, Kathie and Janet gave us eggs for Christmas every year and that collection still adorns my parent's annual Christmas tree...despite my mother's changing tree styles.

But Christmas decorations are like that aren't they? A constant, a yearly reminder.

I'm always excited to make new things. This year I decided that I wanted to carry on the tradition and my aunt Kathie handed me the torch by showing me how to carve them without breaking them.

I worked on the eggs for several days. I kept the first one for myself and the rest will be opened on Christmas day and hung on trees in my friend's and family's homes.

I quickly finished the four that Kathie had lent me from her egg stash and then found myself driving out to Chilliwack to purchase more goose eggs from Fraser Valley Duck and Goose, at the base of a little mountain 75 kms outside of the city. It was a long drive but it was worth it to have the opportunity to craft something beautiful like the older women in my family.

When searching the city for tiny things to put inside the eggs, I happened into an antique/junk store in Gastown and to my surprise, sitting in a bowl at the back of the store were some smaller duck eggs. So I grabbed some of those as well. I hope that before next year I can find somewhere closer than Chilliwack to purchase eggs. Chicken eggs and duck eggs can be used as well, but the large goose eggs are more dramatic, as Kathie says. And quite frankly, it's hard to find things small enough to put inside the big ones anyway.