Brodeur Kahn

M. Nephtalie Kahn of Rouen finished another egg last week. Reporters came out from Paris to interview him at his studio "Aux Oeufs Erodes," (at the sign of the embroidered eggs). If genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, M. Kahn is a genius beyond a doubt. Nephtalie Kahn is the only known egg-embroiderer in the world.

Anyone who has ever opened a boiled egg for breakfast knows something of M. Kahn's difficulties, but difficulties mean nothing to him. It is his boast that any egg that can be laid he can embroider; he has tried them from ostriches' to pigeons'. The Kahn method is first to blow the egg, then to drill thousands of minute holes through the shell, to run colored threads through the holes to form the design. No thread transfixes the entire egg; every, knot and thread end is made on the inside of the shell.

Brodeur Kahn first attracted public attention with a hen's egg known as "Strasbourg" which he sent to the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs. After drilling 1,634 holes in the shell, he embroidered a view of the city on it. He broke 23 eggs before he completed "Strasbourg." Sometimes the shells gave way after he had drilled 1,200 or 1,500 holes, but Nephtalie Kahn never lost his temper. In all he has embroidered 26 eggs. Some of his better known pieces are the ostrich series, showing a butterfly, the salamander of Francois I. and a Gallic cock on which he employed 214 different colors of silk. His masterpiece is a duck egg called "Rouen" which bears the arms of the city. It contains 5,342 holes, some of them only 1/10 millimeter apart. It took him eight months to embroider it and before the egg was blown, drilled and embroidered Brodeur Kahn performed 256,000 different egg-operations, at the rate of 1,000 to 1,100 per day.

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