Friday, August 24, 2007

Snowflake success!

Hi Everyone,

I've been trying to figure out how to do a complicated snowflake cane the easy way. I think I've finally figured it out and I'll be teaching it in October at our guild meeting.

With this technique you generate two sets of reverse snowflakes. What gets cut out of one triangle gets put in the other. The big thing to remember is to try to match the location from one triangle to another. So, in the second photo below you can see that I've used the blade to mark the top of the Christmas tree cutter location for the second triangle.

For the bits on the side of the triangle, I'd take the cutout from the first triangle and place it on the other coloured triangle to make a mark of where the cutter should cut (i.e., take the blue slice from the blue triangle and place it on top of the uncut white triangle in the right location so that a mark forms on the white triangle. Remove the blue slice bit from the white triangle and position cutter at mark line. Cut, and switch colours).

I used six layers of the thickest setting on the pasta machine. The hardest part is the reduction of a large triangle cane but I think I've got that covered as well.

Anyhow, here's a summary. And this is the last post for at least a week and the last of the Christmas themed posting for a bit. My next posting will likely be the results from Marla Frankenburg's class that I'm taking on Sep 8 and 9 (can hardly wait!).


P.S. For those looking for a good way to reduce the triangle portion of the cane, check out my posting here: Marla's method for reducing a cane

Sandy





5 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow I AM impressed Sandy.
I will send my french friends to you blog for sure.
"Tant pis" if they don't understand , your pictures will be enough I think.

Anonymous said...

Hi Sandy,

Welcome to the blogosphere! Your cane work is awesome. I make very few canes myself. I admire people who make detailed canes. What started your interest in cane construction? Thanks for sharing.

-Amy

Sandy said...

Hi Amy,

I got interested in canes years ago trying to do a Santa Claus (what else?) in one of the Santa magazines that comes out at Christmas. The edging around the costume was made out of canes. I tried for hours to make the right cane, but didn't realize that Sculpey is not the most friendly clay for canes.

Then I fell in love with Mike Buessler's stuff and wanted to make landscape canes. I've done a few that I'm happy with, but it's way more easy to do once you watch the video.

I think clayers are drawn to different techniques. I can't seem to master textures, mica shift, or stamping into clay. Others do beautiful work with those techniques and I'm in constant envy and awe.

I also did stained glass and I think canes are similar in construction. Maybe that's where it comes from?

Thanks for the comments,

Sandy

DrMom said...

Wow... impressive. Simple ingenuity. Love it.

Virginie Dufour ... fimodevivi@gmail.com said...

very beautyfull ... I love this post !!! thank you !!! http://fimodevivi.canalblog.com/