Category: Mosaic eggs

This is an old egg, the urethane i used on it for gloss has ambered, but i asked my sister (piano teacher, for whom i made it) to send me a couple pix just so i could remember what it looked like.   I hope i do better now…LOL. I also hope the aquathane that i use now for coating eggs doesn’t do what the old polyurethane did, but i wont keep my hopes up.   I made her a music egg using pysanky also long long ago (like three decades) as well.  The egg shells used to decorate this ostrich egg were dyed with pysanky dyes, then dried and crushed into medium size egg shell tesserae.

This was an experiment in mosaic and color and utilizing those left over bottles of nail polish (i dont use nail polish but my daughter does/did and these have been on the shelf for about 20 years). It was an opportunity to get great color, lots of gloss, glitter and do mosaic at the same time.
I just washed out the egg shells from breakfast, peeled off the inner membrane and let them dry. After that I painted the rounded side with various shades of nail polish. I broke the pieces of painted egg shell into the sizes that I was willing to work with, and glued them with slightly diluted white glue on to a whole shell (this one was a brown egg, contents blown out — and scrambled for breakfast as well).

The white border on this egg was glossed with clear polish with glitter on a white egg shell, but other colors were painted over brown eggs. This is just a matter of choice, and how dense you want the color.

After the glue dried, I glossed the egg twice with varathane. In looking at it, i felt it needed some kind of dimensional border between the white band and the flower area, so i made a thin rope of black polymer clay and placed it on the border between those areas, then cured polymer clay on the egg for about a half hour at 265 F. In an ideal world one would have roughened up the border with a little sand paper, and applied the polymer clay BEFORE glossing to make sure it would stick. I will see how long my black rim stays attached.

This was actually an ostrich egg that was left over from a dozen that I purchased 20 or 30 years ago. I began repurposing the egg about three years ago, thinking that the original design could be made into a mosaic design. I used chicken egg shells, cracked and emptied (for breakfast, ha ha) and washed and dyed in pysanky dyes just slightly crunched into small shapes and applied them with weldbond glue.  I have put a couple of layers of varathane on this egg, i am hoping to put many more on, sanding lightly between, to achieve a smooth finish (as the egg shells are NOT smooth obviously, ha ha). I didnt “grout” the spaces between the egg shells since there was already color on the egg which showed between the tesserae.

I will post a finished egg… I have no clue if the layers of varathane will ever create a smooth surface.  I am going to use a random sampling to estimate the number of pieces… ha ha. So i cut out of paper a frame of one sq inch, and held it over 8 different places on the egg and determined the mean number of pieces per sq inch was right near 60. I went online and googled “surface area of an oblate ovoid” and found two websites with a free online calculator. I put in the three measurements (3″ 3″ and 2.5″) for the ostrich egg and it came up with 89 sq inches, which ends up being just over 5300 pieces of egg shell glued to this ostrich egg.  ha ha