How to cover eggs with polymer clay (fimo, sculpey, premo, kato)

(also check out my quilted eggs)

In my search for beautiful eggs I came across these stunning eggs.  It was truly a significant moment of awe and inspiration!!!  Be sure to scroll to the bottom of her page for the best picture.  Ah!  Aren't they amazing!  Cynthia also has some ridiculously beautiful eggs at Polymer Clay Daily and Carol Simmons' eggs are to die for!

As is mentioned in the links, it is very important that you bake the eggs first so that any moisture in the egg evaporates.  If your egg ends up with an "outie" belly button, you'll just have to shave off the baked clay and cover it with end pieces or a hanger for an ornament.

There have been many post on how to cover eggs with clay.   Dora's Explorations has a good one.  Here I'm going to show you a few ways that I've experimented with.

These first few eggs are made from canes from this stained glass tutorial.  Slices from a square cane can easily be stretched to make diamonds.  I place five of these diamonds on the top of the egg.

When the second row of the pattern is added, only three corners connect.  Therefore this is only a good option if the pattern can work with three adjacent corners as well as four adjacent corners.

Here you see that by the third row, four corners connect. By the final row, you will be back to three corners.

This egg features a square cane made by using this celtic knot tutorial.

Another way to cover eggs, is to design each part specifically for egg making.  This iris egg was made with three different matching canes.  The cane for the bottom was used to make the all-over diamond cane pictured above.

This egg features the cross stitch and gingham tutorials.

For this egg, the dark green was part of the egg, so I didn't have to add that separately.  (the white powder is corn starch)  I used a round cookie cutter to cut out some clay gingham for the top and bottom.  This way I didn't have to stretch and squish the quilt square to meet up at the top.

Finally, I bake the eggs on a bed of cornstarch to keep them from rolling around and from having a flat shinny dot!