Covering eggs. "It must be difficult". "They are so fragile". "I can not make them smooth". Etc. Know them all, heard them all. But I have to say if you have not tried it, how do you know you can´t ?
This method here is also a good one for getting rid of the ugly cane, the oh so boring mud pile of leftover grays. If you have more colourful and better leftovers you might want to try a mirror cut cane project I wrote to polyzine. The project is here.
Ok, lets start.
You need;
- Polymer clay. Any brand. Few leftover canes, and some brighter clay about half a packet or so.
- Pastamachine
- blade
- Egg that is emptied
- oven & thermometer
Ok. Lets start. Take the brighter coloured polyclay and make a sheet with the thickest setting of your pastamachine. Cut some thin slices from your canes and arrange them to the top of this sheet. Anyway you want.
Then take some mudd you always have available in case of emergency need for core clay. Don´t say you don´t have it ? Oh well, improvise. Use a clay straight from packet if you must. Just make another sheet from it like this:
Now you stack them on top of eachother and maybe add some more cane slices to make this more interesting.
Now roll all of this trough your pastamachine with the thickest setting. You get a much bigger sheet.
Closeup from the sheet. Does it look cool to you ?
I thought it was cool, but not cool enough this time. So I shreaded it to pieces I stacked carefully thinking about construction (NOT !!!!) and made another sheet out of them. Then I put it trough pastamachine.
My so called master plan was full of holes, so I ripped parts from the end to cover them...
You don´t notice this is different sheet, ok.
Now you just take the egg and cut a sheet large enought to cover that egg. Fold the sheet over the egg and pinch the seams tight. Cut the residue clay away. (Hey: now you have some good base clay to start this process all over again!!!)
Ok. Now here you see what happens if you believe that "too fragile" assumption. This can happen, but only if you use your hands wrongly. The egg needs smoothing and what better way to do it than roll it between hands. You can use surrprisingly large amount of force with it. But, in the line of do not do what I did here, if you use one or two fingers to push the seams, you brake your egg. No pressing with thumbs, and your egg will be all ok.
And then you bake the egg in manufacturers recomended temperature and time and put it into a bowl or something, take a picture with your digi camera and send link to me so I can add it to this page. Right. Any questions ?
Hey, don´t go jet: additional ideas for using this method
- forget the egg and use the sheets to cover altoid tins, vases etc.
- cover your egg with a sheet, bake and then add some decorations for the egg.
- forget the egg. Use pieces of the sheet to cover beads. Very organic, maby even artsy ;-)
- Use cookie cutters with the sheet and decorate something else with the cut outs.
- go figure (as if you did not already do that)
And here I shall add links to people who wanna show others what they did with theese instructions.
while waiting you can see few of the eggs I have made
