Category: Custom decorated eggs

Same cane as previous easter egg from 2018. Different take.  Polymer clay and empty egg shells. This one might be my favorite, since it has the two petal flower with red center in a large and a smaller version and i put the “thorns” in the green background.

Had a lot of fun with the euphorbia milii cane that i made for easter eggs this easter. Made two of them while listening to easter messages.  Two petal red flower with yellow center is in the center of the round white cane. This egg and others were made from left over clay from memory-bead projects.

I like playing with this technique of swirling ropes of polymer clay to cover objects… and I do love the oblate ovoid as a shape to use…and egg shells are pretty much “freebies” as a base.  I this technique first on the internet and of course have come no where near mastering it, but it fits my style of art — the love of dimension and the desire to build 3D constructions. This egg differes from  previous rope eggs in that I did NOT use a layer of translucent polymer clay as a base, but built the first row – rope and cured the egg, then added a second and third layer and cured it again.  I used a tiny bit of liquid polymer clay underneath the ropes to help them stay in position on the egg while I worked. Finally I punched out the egg in the “empty” spots, sanded and digested out the calcium of the egg shell with two changes of vinegar bath over about an 8 hour period.  The egg has a single coat of varathane, inside and out.

Just fun!. And an easy project to “come and go” from, not demanding to be finished in one sitting. My goal is to figure out how to keep the freshness of the color  — pretty fresh here, though I did use mostly left over scrap clay, and add the flower petals or party glitter, to make these eggs remembrances and keepsakes — but keeping the clean look, which is difficult when the flower petals are added. I am looking around for items that will build texture. because this egg just has two… a pencil end and the edge of my knife.  I did try a philips scredriver head but that didn’t work very well.  I would like to find a hollow metal dowel. The thickness of the ropes is about 1/8 inch.

This was another in a series of holey eggs (notice i did not say holy). I like the dimensionality of the eggs that have little tunnels for light to show through to the front and the rigid egg structure forms a great base for keeping the clay stable while it cures. THe logistics of getting the flowers to stay put took a little planning.
I covered an emptied with white Fimo, then before i cured it i marked out with a round cutter what areas I was going to excavate. Before curing also, i removed the uncured clay from those rounded areas but kept the eggshell intact until after it was cured and fairly rigid. ( i use small eggs generally, as adding two layers of polymer clay sheeting can ultimately create really big eggs… ha ha.
I created a spiral cane that incorporated rose petal leaves as a memorial (dark red specks seen in the red and pink and white and yellow clay are rose petal pieces)(these were from a customer’s funeral bouquet), using various shades of red and yellow and white, which i sliced thinky and applied to the egg (keeping the holes in the second layer of clay visible…and cutting edges of this layer out from the hole areas.
After curing i punched out the egg shell carefully from the holes, and sanded the outside of the egg, as well as the holes.
I used a wire armature covered first with a thin coil of green clay then worked as a smooth casing for the stems of the flowers, and secured the flower to the end of each wire with a green polymer clay flower center and then cured all the flowers with their stems separately. After that cure I trimmed off the polymer clay up to just 1/4 inch above the length I wanted to have the stem be…. exposing just a little wire on each flower, just enough to push into uncured clay to keep them upright.
Then i pushed and molded some green polymer clay into the bottom center of the egg, shoving it through several of the holes and packing it down using the end of a pencil.
I dipped the wire (that is, the bottom end of each of the the green stems with pink flowers)  in a little liquid sculpy, hoping that this would help the stems bond with the central lump on the bottom inside of the egg once i pushed the wire ends of the flower stems into it. When all flowers were arranged I cured the egg for an hour at 265 (previous cures were just long enough to harden the parts, so not a good cure….but just enough to allow me to work with the flower parts).
Three little green feet act as a stand…. i think i would have preferred, in hind sight, to have a translucent ring for a stand instead. Left and center images, side view, right image is a view from the top (taken indoors)

As is typical for me,  this still needs a lot of work (mostly sanding)… i am so bad at tending to those final details…  btw, no varathone on this egg…. dont know what my reasoning is there.

This was a simple egg, not that spectacular, but a test to see whether i could put a maltese cross cane on an egg and maintain the shape of the cane slices.  Result is that I could use more practice, but also kind of a nice egg.

I used a marbled black-red-white polymer clay mix for a border for the cane and this produced an irregular effect. I haven’t decided whether I like that effect or not, but in some circumstances it is useful to have experimented.

Photograph after a winter snow – ha ha.

A large chicken egg was emptied, washed and covered with a thin layer of translucent clay. (would that i were able to purchase the expensive translucent clay… ha ha… this is Premo) with areas to be removed scored with a knife, and then cured. The early cures i don’t worry too much about time, just enough to make the clay hard enough to work with.  (dont forget to poke a hole in the bottom of the clay covered egg to prevent the little “blister” from expanding hot air — this is a nemesis for me, i often forget and then end up patching the bottom).

After the first cure, the areas marked are excavated, but i leave the egg shell within just so that when i cure the egg again and again after rows of colored rope are added, that the original calcium carbonate structure helps support the egg while it cures, if the areas are thin, sometimes they slump. After the initial cure i sanded the holes and added the black rim and cured again. So i just added rows and rows, maybe two at a time until the egg was covered.

After the final cure i removed the egg shell with vinegar (takes several hours and a little scrubbing and sanding), and then used aquathane just on the interior.  In this photo you can see just a little bit of the color showing through the translucent base.  I bet one could do this without the translucent base, but in my hands, sometimes the pressure cracks the egg…. the larger eggs seem to have less dense calcium structure.

This egg is was made by covering an egg with a thin layer of pink polymer clay, and before curing, marking the holes to be excavated later with a cookie cutter type tool. This included a 1 cm hole at the very bottom of the egg which would be used to work with the wires. The egg was cured, then a knife used to finish cutting out the holes, and the holes and exterior of the egg sanded (as smooth as ‘mm’ allows time for it, sadly, never smooth enough).

Little hearts (also made with a cookie cutter, thick enough to have an eye pin inserted in the bottom as the stem, were made, i think 20 total. The initials of my grandchildren were stamped into one side of each of the hearts.  The hearts on pins were cured.  The eye pins were made from a spool of wire, as most needed to be longer than commercial wires. 

The pins were inserted in the holes and the ends brought out the bottom, and gathered together in a small lump of polymer clay (small enough that it could be pushed up into the egg after the wires were securely curedin the clay).  After that, wires were wrapped up over the lump of clay, and trimmed to only include a tiny “bend” over the lump.  A base, and a cover was fashioned for the egg and cured again.  After that, positioning the hearts within the holes was possible.

I had intended to decorate with marker and paint, the outside of the egg, and to put a wash over the embossed letters…. still will happen i hope, and i will post then another picture.  This photo was in the blinding sun and the snow…. not that great. haha.

Truly this egg was a “throw together” from some well used, left over, not that great, slightly abused, polymer clay canes. It was really just a way to practice covering eggs, using what I likely should have thrown out in terms of left over polymer clay. But i kind of liked the abstract and unpredictable (though dark) way this turned out. Just looking at it now makes me want to make a “bar code” egg and see if i can get it through the Kroger scanner.  ha ha

In a santa claus egg I made a few weeks ago, I decided I did not like how the “spiral cane worked out for the mustache so i edited it, as follows:  May not be an improvement, but I think i am through playing around. As usual, a little more patience and diligence could so improve my clay skills…. I havn’t figured out what part of my brain pushes me to another idea before the last one is complete.