Not your usual Easter eggs. . .

OSMOND — Luella Hodson recently hosted some friends for a couple of days in making Ukrainian eggs, a craft she has been doing since the early 1980s. The group included Jeannie Oltjenbruns, Sandy Jones, Joyce Tacey, Stephanie Stueckrath, Kathy Wilke, Karla Rice and former Osmond residents Barbara Baird and Paula Gore.

There was a large group making the eggs the first day, and when Karla — who had never done this before — heard about it, she asked if Luella could teach her. So she came the second day, when it was just a small group of Karla, Luella and Paula. “She did so good!” Luella said.

Luella’s ancestors are Germans from Russia and her great-grandparents came from the Ukraine. So when Kathy asked if she wanted to take a class with her, she said “Yeah!”

They took the classes in Yankton, and then later, Luella said, she started teaching classes at the Norfolk Art Center.

“We also used to do them here at the public school,” she added.

Luella said she and a group of friends get together every year to make the Ukrainian eggs. They use farm-fresh eggs, and blow out the insides afterwards.

“It’s like batik,” she said. “It’s a wax resist.” They are made with dyes, a candle, beeswax, and a little tool called a kitska.

According to a book on Ukrainian Easter Eggs that Luella provided, each color has a specific meaning, as do other symbols, such as the sun, star, birds, heart, fruits and vegetables, flowers, wheat, spiders and others.

In the Ukrainian Easter, the Pysanky (Ukrainian egg) were made at night after the children were asleep. Only women in the family could work together and no one else was allowed to peek, since the purpose of creating pysanky was to transfer goodness from the household to the designs and push away evil. The women in the family asked different blessings for each egg.

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