Sealed with a symbol: Barb Duncan practices pysanky, a traditional Ukrainian folk art

Baskets and baskets of eggs, some painted with dazzling patterns, others still white, are heaped on Barb Duncan's studio table.

There are chicken eggs, goose eggs, quail eggs, emu eggs and a single giant ostrich egg perched in the center of the table like a smooth creamy coconut.

"Here -- toss it to me," she says excitedly, passing the ostrich egg over. "Isn't that something? You could drop that on the carpet in the other room, and it would be just fine."

Barb Duncan melts beeswax from an egg while creating Ukrainian egg art, pysanky, inside her Jackson home. (Laura Simon)

Here in the unfinished half of her basement -- her art can be messy, as her motley stained fingertips attest -- she practices a traditional Ukrainian folk art called pysanky (peez-AHN-kee), or egg-painting.

"I was able to go over [to Eastern Europe] in the early '90s. I had the privilege of visiting with a group from my church," says Duncan, a retired schoolteacher. "And I was able to bring their culture back into my classroom. We were able to arrange pen pals."

She was quite taken with the culture of Ukraine, and found the egg art especially fascinating. The art uses egs that have been drained, cleaned and dried, leaving delicate hollow eggshells to be painted.

"There's so much symbology," she says. "Everything has a meaning."

She points to two big posters off to the side of her workspace that show a key of sorts, one to the meaning of symbols, the other to the meaning of colors. Spirals indicate immortality, the eight-pointed star symbolizes Christ, and green means hope.

Barb Duncan holds a completed Ukrainian egg art, pysanky, inside her Jackson home. (Laura Simon)

The challenge, Duncan says, is combining different symbols, intertwining them to make a statement. A tiny quail egg may represent two dozen individual ideas.

"Even the egg itself is symbolic," she explains. "It's a symbol of spring, resurrection, Christ. That's why I do it, to be able to represent Christ in my art."

The process of making a pysanka, or single painted egg, uses melted wax to control which parts of the egg take color over several rounds of dyeing.

"The first part is thinking about the colors I want to use," Duncan explains. "What do I want it to mean?"

She then sketches out a design in pencil on the surface of the empty eggshell -- she buys her eggs "pre-blown" from a company in Minnesota -- and readies the wax.

"It's got to be 100 percent beeswax," she explains. "That's all that will do."

Then, using a small copper funnel called a kistka, she traces over the lines she doesn't want tinted before applying dye with a cotton swab. When she's finished, the eggshell, with the hole at the bottom carefully plugged, is dunked in a glass of dye.

"You go from light colors to dark colors," she explains, peering down through her magnifying glass and tracing carefully. "And once all my colors are saved, I put it in a background color."

Once the dyeing is complete, she melts the beeswax off with a candle.

"You always want to be sure to hold the egg to the side of the flame, not directly over it," she explains. "It'll burn and those black marks won't come off."

The final step is sealing the egg in polyurethane wax, after which the egg will last indefinitely. Duncan advises not using an unblown egg, as they tend to explode if improperly handled while the egg's insides decompose.

Now, depending on the design, Duncan can make a pysanka in less than half an hour. And having been a teacher her whole life, she gives lessons and hosts hands-on seminars.

Barb Duncan applies dye to create Ukrainian egg art, pysanky, inside her Jackson home, Monday, Feb. 22, 2015. (Laura Simon)

"But even now, my favorite part is melting off the wax," she says. "Because you're never completely sure what you'll have underneath. You always get a lot of 'oohs' and 'ahhs' when people see their final project. Sometimes you forget that you even put something on there."