Covering anything that doesn’t run away in polymer clay is pretty much a clayer’s mandate. December of 2009 I made a tutorial for covering round ornaments to get a different sort of look – as well as a potentially smoother coverage – and that tutorial is still a technique I use often.
In fact, I thought, why couldn’t I cover Easter eggs the same way? So I experimented a bit. Some of my issues are due to the fact that I used plastic eggs rather than regular chicken eggs. You’ll need to try out your egg in the oven but the ones I grabbed were the bag of cheapies from Walmart and they didn’t melt in the oven.
They are a little flimsy, so you have to be careful not to pinch the waist when working or they move. And for best results, leave a hole open where the hot air from IN the egg can escape. That means poking a hole through one of the holes on the egg once you’ve covered it.
You can see on one of my experiments where I DIDN’T leave the hole open and it bulged at the spot where there’s a hole in the plastic under it. On the other experiment, I left it open but made it big and ugly.
Just like the covering ornaments tutorial, you’ll want to prepare a few sheets of clay to cut up. A little goes a long way again. I did the sheets for my eggs a little thicker than for the ornaments since I wasn’t sure how the eggs would shift in baking but I probably didn’t need to worry about that.
The diagram is very similar to the one you’d use for the round ornaments. The length of it needs to be the same as the length from tip to bottom of your egg. In my case, that was a shade over 3 1/2″. And the waist on your egg needs to be the mid-point on YOUR template. Which means you’ll want to edit mine so it works for your eggs. Don’t worry about cutting the shape out too precisely – or do a few scrap ones like I did – because you’ll have to tinker with the sizes. The eggs were a bit fussier to do than just covering the round ornaments but basically you stretch out one side of the template (to cover the tip) and shorten the other side a little (to cover the base).
Here are two of my experiments! One is done from some eye-popping cane covered sheets and the other is done from sheets of marbled scrap clay.
4 Responses
Thanks for the tutorial! I had eyed the plastic Easter eggs at Walmart last week and didn’t get any because I was afraid they’d melt. Thanks to you, I bought some and made one last night. It worked great! I only left one hole open, and had seen somewhere awhile back that if you make a little clay plug and insert it into the hole while it’s still hot and then pop it into the oven for another few minutes, you can later trim any extra clay from the plug and sand it smooth. Voila — no hole!
Excellent! Will have to go fix up the next batch that way!