- Hi, I'm Christine Luschas, I'm an attorney and I'm a Lithuanian egg artist.

I'm an attorney in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, I have many interests where I play music, and a lot of times what I like to do is I like to do different types of artwork, specifically I do Lithuanian egg crafts.

Lithuania is an Agrarian society and they started as a Pagan society and a lot of their culture was Agrarian based, and then they moved to Catholicism and a lot of those traditions still came over into their new traditions, connecting with Christianity.

So the eggs actually connected to Easter, eggs have our tradition of rebirth.

They also were used as part of a game as well as symbolism's and gifts to one another.

So the Lithuanian word for Easter egg is Marguciai, Marguciai means a variation in the variation of colors.

So eggs actually got those different variation of colors historically by natural dyes.

They did that by dying things, most traditionally with onion skins, eggs were hard boiled in onion skins to get a brown color.

They also dyed them with many other colors such as birch leaves, turmeric, coffee grounds even make it a nice brown, and that's how they had variations of colors.

They also then decorated them.

They decorated them in my way, which is a scratched method.

Blowing out an egg is actually extremely easy, easier than you would think.

An egg is naturally sphere, sphere is one of the strongest shapes.

You take a pin and you prick the top and the bottom of the egg, and then you take a round file to make that hole a little bit bigger.

There's two different ways to blow out the egg at that point, you can go old fashion, blow it out with your mouth, or you can use an egg pump.

I have an egg pump because I blow out many eggs at once at one sitting.

Dying a hollow egg, they won't dip down into the dye, so I used some tongs, put them in the dye and then it'll dye any color that I want.

At that point, I will draw my design onto the egg.

You can use a pencil 'cause you can take those stray marks off later.

And then I take a box cutter, just a simple box cutter that you can get from any hardware store, and I start scratching onto my egg with my with my box cutter.

Once I scratch the design that I want, I can take off my stray marks and you have a completed egg.

I was asked if I would be on the Martha Stewart Show, she was doing an egg episode, and if I wanted to come on the show to show her how to scratch eggs.

Martha Stewart's Polish, she knows how to do the pysanky eggs, but she's never heard how to do scratched eggs and I got to show Martha how to scratch eggs.

She was a pleasure to deal with and what was amazing was to know that there was an egg craft that Martha Stewart did not know, wanted to know, and I had the opportunity to show her and in turn show a lot of people on TV how to do something that probably wasn't known by at least 80% of them.

The best part of my craft is that it's not well known.

I want it to be well-known.

I want everyone to see this type of craft, be excited about seeing something they haven't seen before and then ask about it.

Every time someone asks about it, they get to hear a story about a country that they might not even know about.

Not many people do know the country Lithuania and once they hear about a country they don't know about, a craft they don't know about, they want to learn about it immediately.

And it's fantastic to be able to show that to them and to be able to share it with them, because once they walk away, they're walking away with more information and an excitement that they didn't have before.

So, it's important to me to be able to share that with them.

It's also important, especially in Northeast Pennsylvania because Northeast Pennsylvania has a lot of Eastern European people and Eastern European cultures.

And some are surviving more than others and Lithuanian crafts are not as well-represented, and we're changing that with every craft show we go to, with every egg we put out, with everything we share, we're adding and contributing to our society even more.

(folk music)