This egg was just so fun to make, and I learned some things (which I always do when experimenting with polymer clay). I used two types of armature in the spines in the egg, which is sort of like an alien sea urchin, metal and wood. The obvious wooden armature is the small dowel of wood, one end of which I sharpened and the other was a bent wire. A third curly blue strand has no armature, but is also quite thin, and it did not slump under its own weight during three curing processes.
Step one was to cover an emptied chicken egg with translucent polymer clay (color probably doesn’t matter), a very thin layer, and before curing I carved an equator. After curing it was easy to just poke through the shell at the equator so I didn’t have to use my dremel (which makes a horribly dusty cutting event). This leads me to believe that if I can create other shapes in this same way, not just half-an-egg shapes. I covered the half and created a “flat bottom” for the egg and drilled, by hand, a about a dozen holes (which i retrospect I would drill at a later point were I to do this again. I cured the egg again, and added the rounded spots and made the spikes and curves and cured them each separately. I trimmed about 1/8 to 1/4 inch of clay, exposing each armature, at the base.
Lastly I assembled the spikes and curls by pushing the exposed armature at the end of each into the holes I had drilled, using just a little bit of liquid polymer clay to insure a bond. I cured the egg again, and then added the balls at the ends of the spikes and curls (not the tiny blue one, as it would certainly have slumped under the weight. The balls were made with polymer clay and some yellow powder that causes the clay to fluoresce after exposure to sunlight.
Then lots of Varathane to cover.. ha ha.