Polymer Clay Tutorial: Petal Easter Egg

This egg is easy and a lot of fun to make.  You can use any kind of leaf-shaped cane that you want and in as many colors as you choose.  I usually make these over a plastic egg covered in mud and baked (click here to see how to do that) but you can use a blown-out real egg if you'd prefer.

Materials:
1 or more leaf canes or leaf-shaped canes, 1/2 to 3/4 inch the long way
1 prepared plastic or real egg
liquid clay or white glue

Tools:
tissue blade

Instructions:
So here are my five canes.  I made these a long time ago for another project and I'm hoping that I have enough left to do the whole egg!  I've got pink, light green, pale blue, white, and light yellow.

Start by cutting off 10 or 15 slices of each cane to get you started.  Try to get them pretty much the same thickness (2mm or so).  Squash the sides of the point together a little to give them some shape.  Spread some liquid clay or white glue on the narrow end of the egg.  For the first row, I like to kind of bend each of the petals almost in half.  Then I space them evenly in a flower shape on top of the egg with the points together.  After they are all even on there, I bend the sides out so they fill in the tip of the egg pretty much solid and flatten the round ends of the slices to the egg.

Now I add a row of petals with their points overlapping the seam between the other petals.

Then I add petals between those and start another row.  They will almost never line up perfectly, so just keep adding petals and filling in the gaps so there is no mud showing through.

This is what it will look like from the top:

(Sorry it turned out so blurry, hopefully you get the idea anyway.)

Keep adding more rows of cane slices with liquid clay or white glue under them...

From the top again...

When you get the egg covered about halfway, stop and bake it.  I put my egg on a round metal cutter and put it in a pie tin for baking.  This way, you can work on the second half without squashing the slices of the first half.

(Sorry about the photos for the rest of this... one of my kids messed with my camera settings and I didn't realize it until it was too late.)
Now spread some more liquid clay or white glue and keep adding cane slices.

I'm almost done adding slices.  Try to end with the last one in the middle of the bottom of the egg.

Here's all of the cane slices on there.

Now, you can either leave it like that and make a stand for your egg or you can do what I do and make it self-standing.  Set it on your work surface, make sure it's level and press down to flatten the bottom.

Now that bottom slice is pressed into the rest.

Since the bottom is flat, I don't need to prop it to bake the egg.  I just put it on a kleenex in the pan and cure it.

And there you are!  (Once again, lousy picture but you get the idea!)

Enjoy!
Korrina