Shelling out more of the facts …

How large is your home collection?
I probably have about 40 finished eggs still. Some of them are my earliest. I’m keeping them just because I’m sentimental. As a woman, your work never stays done. But with the eggs, it’s such a lovely surprise to think that I did something that stayed done, and it’s still nice to look at.

How many eggs have you painted?
My most productive years were near the beginning. By 1990, I had them in several shops in Boston. In 1991, when I did the Copley Hotel egg, I had painted 117 eggs. After I retired from teaching, caregiving became an almost immediate circumstance and I didn’t do as many. Not counting the church fairs, I’ve probably painted about 600 eggs.

What is your personal favorite?
Probably the first ones that I painted the inside scenes. No one had seen anyone do that before. In 1992, I painted one with different seasons on the outside and inside for a dear friend in appreciation of her help with my daughter’s wedding. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it worked. And it was a special time and a special friend.

Where do you get your eggs?
At first, I ordered them from a place in Michigan. The exotic ones we got when we were in Florida. There was a lady in Minot that I used to get eggs from, but then we found a lady in North Hampton, N.H., who could supply hundreds of eggs. I probably still have about 400 unpainted eggs. If I live to be 100, I guess I’ll still be painting eggs.

How do you prepare the eggs for artwork?
My husband is really the engineer behind the scenes. He devised the vacuum that cleaned the yolk out of the eggs. We would set an egg on a spigot that he had fastened on a five-gallon bucket. There was another opening attached to the hose of a vacuum cleaner, and when we turned it on, the pressure just pulled the yolk right out of the egg and into the bucket. When we first tried it, we had just a gallon bucket. We were so excited being able to do so many eggs at a time that we forgot to look down. We had yolk overflowing all over the floor.
Bernard also came up with a way to attach a small and decorated metal shaft through an egg so that I could create an egg inside an egg. Whatever it was that I had an idea for, he would somehow find a way to make it happen.

What is the longest you worked on an egg?
I guess my eggs have ranged from 3 to 40 hours. It really depends on the design and size of an egg. The longest one was probably a cluster of grapes. I had to draw, then ink in the outlines. Then I used a dental drill to carve out any shell that wasn’t part of the grapes. Then I painted it. I always carved before I painted because if I was going to break one, I didn’t want to waste painting time.

What was the most complicated egg you created?
A lady had commissioned an anniversary egg for her friends. She wanted the egg to reflect the couple as a whole and as individuals. So the outside egg showed his interest in sailing, hers in music. The inside egg rotated so that on one half you could see all of the family data – birthdays, anniversaries, and such. The other half showed their shared love for gardening.

How do you keep from breaking the eggs?
(Laugh). Well, if you’re going to work with eggs, you can’t be too uptight. I managed to get fairly comfortable with them. I usually worked in a carpeted room. One time, I was painting a scene inside an egg and there was a speck of dust in there. When I blew it out, the egg went shooting out of my hands. Oh well. Another time, I dropped an egg from the kitchen counter to the floor, and it didn’t break.
The interesting thing is that I never worry about children handling the eggs. They somehow know to hold them in their whole hands. And because they’re young, they have a lot of moisture in their skin. Older people seem to have the hardest time. Their skin is dry so the egg tends to slip out, and they try to be so careful that they lose their grip.

How do you produce the images?
Sometimes I sketch them on paper first. Sometimes I sketch them on the egg. Unless someone gives me a specific design or picture, I always just create the images from my head. I love using water colors, and I mix them with a little acrylic to stabilize the color. When the egg is all finished, I coat it with a polyurethane.

Where do you get your ideas?
I’ll go through long periods when I just cannot do it. Then one day, the energy will come back to the surface. Usually from hearing other people’s stories. I love the challenge of telling other people’s stories. And I’m always inspired with anything to do with my faith. I’ve done the entire Easter (Holy) Week on an egg, passages and chapters from the Bible. Scores of music. Anything to do with the church is always very easy for me.