Purple dragon egg

Now that I’m all caught up with the outstanding card blog posts, I can start writing up the other bits that are scattered around my craft room.

This was directly inspired by Emma’s dragon eggs over at Puddleside Musings.

Emma was wondering about ways to add colour to her shiny silver eggs and that got my brain ticking over. I grabbed a handful of drawing pins and tested various things that came to hand: Copic markers, Vintaj paint, acrylic paint and even foil. They all worked to one degree or another, though the paints would have needed a layer of varnish or similar sealant to avoid chipping.

After experimenting for a bit, I visited Mr Google and asked him what everyone else used for their dragon eggs. And the answer was a resounding “nail varnish”. I rarely wear nail varnish, but I did have a few bottles around from the last phase I went through.

Taking Emma’s warning to heart regarding the quantity of pins needed I varnished lots of pins… And still ended up having to do some extra ones at the end.

I made two different colours of pins and each needed a couple of layers of varnish to get a decent coverage.

Once they were all dry, I started sticking them into the foam egg from the bottom in a spiral pattern, alternating the colours. When I got to the top, the pins were held slightly away from the surface of the egg so I added a blob of glue to stop the last one slipping out.

This egg is approximately 8.5cm high and 6cm at its widest. I think I ended up using over 400 drawing pins to cover it (I did make a note of it somewhere, but who knows where that was — I’ll doubtless come across it at some point).