Monster Canes - week 15 of canes

Hi Everyone,

We had a clay day today Barb's house.  Three Barbs, a Patti, me, and Elaine.  They worked on beads and I worked on this monster cane.  I've been wanting to do him for a while and yesterday with the good company was a perfect time.

This cane was inspired by the beautiful fish canes from Kim Korringa.  I simply flipped the fish 90 degrees, added some feet and arms, and presto! Monster canes.

I started using an oval cutter and cutting into a purple and a turquoise skinner blend.  These were remnants from when I was trying to choose colours for the spiral cane that I did earlier.  Cut about 3/8 down and reversed the heads.  Inserted a bullseye cane into the heads and then added other details. 

If you haven't noticed yet, take a look at the photo and see that there really are two different coloured monsters. 

I put one oval on top of the other and pushed them together firmly so on one end of the cane I had a purple headed monster and on the other end of the cane I had a turquoise headed monster.  Wrapped these in translucent, cut away the translucent to make the feet and arms and then started reducing.

One thing became quickly apparent.  Even though I thought my black clay in the bullseye for the eye was soft enough, it wasn't.  It didn't want to move.  And, because I had put the bullseye cane into each monster separately, when I was reducing from the middle it simply travelled to the outside of the cane and left a gaping hole in the middle.  As a consequence the middle of the cane monsters don't have eyes.  You can see that in the smaller cane bits in the photos.  I suspect if I had created the eyes after joining the two ovals together then this wouldn't have happend.

But the cane came out OK and now I have bits to make Bottles with.  Best of all the bottle toppers are perfect just with a googly eye glued to them.  Easiest way to make bottle lids and that's always a good thing.

He/they are cute and I'll try something like this again.  Perhaps I'll even make fish canes since I suspect that they might make beautiful wonderful BOHs.  The process took about two hours and I've got about 6 inches of cane.  A lot of that was colour selection.

Thanks to Kim Korringa for the inspiration.

Cheers,

Sandy