Category: Miscellaneous

left over egg ideas, artwork, and other things

Tiny yolk-less chicken egg and polymer clay cane

This was a special egg, tiny and without a yolk, that I had so much fun using with polymer clay.  It stands just about an inch and a half tall, so cute.  The cane was made with whites browns and black, with just a touch of red and green in the spaces between where I layered on the canes.  Someday hopefully I will get really careful like some of the clay artists and put these on perfectly square, or round, but for now i really enjoy the combination of chaos and order.  Sometimes for me, too much order in a cane project, is a little boring.

I especially like the contrast between the tiny black dots (the repetition and order) and the large areas of color (chaos).

Valentine egg and polymer clay

This was just fun and easy to make. I used a butterfly cane (created for something else) with whites browns and black.  I rounded up the cane and just put slices on on willy-nilly, and didn’t forget to poke in an air hole (where the original contents of the egg was removed) so i didn’t get an expansion bubble and cured the egg.  Then i added a collar of the same cane, and made a separate ring stand for the bottom and cured again.  I drilled a hole in the top and built some leaves and added three oreo-cookie-heart-shaped -red-filled objects at the top (the stem on each heart cookie was a metal eye pin about 1.5 inches long (the looped part pushed into the red clay before pressing the cookie parts together.  After the hearts were assembled i poked the eye pins through the hole at the top and squeezed in the leaves a little to hold them in place, cured the egg a third time and sanded some rough spots. The whole thing is coated with Varathane.  I think this will be for one of my grandkids.

Egg shell and polymer clay: snowman scarf and ear muffs

The base of this polymer clay and egg shell snowman is an extra large and a medium egg shell, emptied, covered halfway with thinly rolled white polymer clay.  I used a scalloped shaped cookie cutter (tiny tiny) to cut out the snowflake patterns from the uncured white clay layer over the egg. then created a blue and purple cane, and sliced it the same thickness as the white covering of the eggs, cut a scalloped shape and put it in the space where i removed the cut from the white layer. I rolled these two halves of the snowman smooth, then used the tip of a phillips screwdriver  to make the spikes in the snow added the coal eyes and carrot nose.  I cured the two halves, sanded and trimmed a little and then put them together with white polymer clay and liquid polymer clay.  i cured the pieces as one.  Then added the scarf.  Ear muffs were made from faux fur (a circle cut just bigger than the plastic drapery rings that i found lying around, and used as the base of the muff. I used hot glue to cover, and then also hot-glued the head wired (cut and bent to shape).

I would have preferred a bigger body and a smaller head, but didn’t have any eggs on hand that fit the bill the way i would have wanted…. so i used what i had–the story of all my art.  I did put varathane on the eyes, mouth and scarf.

Egg – head brains

What mom do you know that would give this hand made brain to a daughter for christmas (LOL). Me, anatomist, biologist, science illustrator, nutty person, with a daughter just graduating from Wright State in behavioral sciences.

Real (emptied) chicken egg is the base of this egg head brain sculpture, covered with a very think layer of translucent polymer clay (to give it some stability). The folds in the brain were just made with a long rolled rope of translucent clay (which here certainly is not the highly convoluted brain of a very intelligent human) but is maybe like a mouse or rat.  You can still see some relevant convolutions, like the motor and sensory convolutions areas. I made the temporal lobe a little too flat, but it is still identifiable. The fun part was of course cerebellum with its unique surface patterning, convolutions on a different scale.

Olfactory bulbs and nerves and optic nerves are disproportionately large here, just for easy identification.  The egg brain can be removed from the stand and turned over where there is the optic chiasm, the there are mammillary bodies, and a pituitary (which would normally have been more hidden in the brain case, but I added here for fun).

Here is a link to read concerning a possible reason for convolutions, and a great video:

Raggedy ann and andy bread dough ornaments, bit the dust.

Raggedy ann and andy bread dough ornaments, bit the dust.  I was really surprised (I don’t know why, I have had bread dough sculptures get moldy and soft and buggy before) when I unpacked christmas tree ornaments this year.  Ha Ha. Poor raggedy ann and andy….  they took a severe dusting this year in the cedar closet.  This is spookier than “walking dead”.

I had actually been a little sad looking at all the ornaments made with my children, and not a single one will be in town, nor any of my grandkids… So was just a bit sour, then found these, and that surely brightened the day.  Ha ha ha.

I don’t know what the half life for your bread dough ornaments is, but these have been around for almost 40 years.

Tiny cockatiel egg: pysanky

I had fun trying to learn how to get dyes to take on tiny cockatiel eggs. They actually have a pretty non-porous surface compared to other “washed” eggs. They are also pretty fragile and I broke several just trying to get the insides cleaned out.

This tiny one was made sometime in the 1980s i believe, and it is about an inch in height.

cockatiel_pysanky_egg

Pumpkin with fluorescent interior

I invented something funny here, at least I didn’t copy anyone else, but probably somewhere in the world someone has made carved a pumpkin like this and made the interior fluorescent.  The idea came to me after I made a little pumpkin egg sculpture out of polymer clay (found HERE), and then I wondered whether I could make it into an actual pumpkin size carving.

  1. carve the pumpkin
  2. scrape the edges really well, and pat dry
  3. wait until the interior is pretty dry to the touch (I ended up putting this whole big pumpkin in the oven at just over 100 oF for an hour or so.
  4. Paint the interior with a stain blocking primer (I used water based Kilz) and let that dry for several days.
  5. Spray paint the interior of the pumpkin with fluorescent yellow spray paint (well I used spray paint, but I think a jar of paint would have been a better idea.

fluorescent_pumpkin