Landscape Canes

Hi Everyone,

I realized that I haven't posted in a while. That's partly due to me working a fair bit of overtime at my new job. I'm also hosting the Clayamies 2007 Christmas Ornament Swap so I've been planning my Christmas ornaments which I'm happy with but can't show here because it would ruin the surprise for the participants. There are 16 of us this year so there's a fair bit of logistics to figure out.

So to fill in some space I thought I would show some of my landscape canes. The first photo in this grouping is the very first landscape that I tried. I was inspired by Mike Buessler's work which you can see here. I had no idea what I was doing and this one took me HOURS to do. I layered each individual stripe in the cane. It's still one of my favourites, but doesn't look very much like his skilled work.

I tried a couple of others that weren't even remotely successful and decided that it was time to order Mike's video. It's amazing and well worth the price for anyone who is interested in making landscape canes. Some of my inspiration for the snowflake canes came from his method of cutting out bits and pieces (I call it cookie cutter caning).



The shots above are a couple of more attempts that came out OK and not so OK. I like the cane on the left - it made some beautiful beads. The cane on the right wasn't as successful but the clay colours from it made some amazing scrap clay caning (another technique that I need to write up).

I taught a tutorial at Morrisburg this spring and the landscape cane in this next image came from the demo. This is a faux jade book (technique taught by Gaby) that we made at Morrisburg and the cane seemed to fit right in with the theme that I had chosen. The scanned colours of the jade are a bit off - the blue in the landscape is more harmonious than it appears in this image.




And, I also created this landscape cane as part of my practice for my tutorial. I don't seem to have any cane left, but here's a box that I covered with it. It's got a bit of a southwestern feel in my mind.



I do want to get back into making more landscape canes. I have plenty of light blue clay around and clouds are just so much fun to make. Maybe after Christmas I'll have some more samples.