My Tessellated Canes!

Hi Everyone,

I finally received some Christmas presents that I was waiting for and one of my presents was Judy Belcher's Millefiori Story DVD. I'd been looking forward to this DVD for a long time and was particularly excited about the Tessellated Canes.

My mother happened to be visiting this weekend and she's tempted to get into clay so we thought we'd try the Tessellated Cane. We decided on a simple colour scheme - Mom really likes red and we thought the black would make the red pop.

I do have to say, I was really and completely unimpressed with the pre-tessellated cane that we started with. I don't tend to use black in my pallette very much at all (everyone asks me if I've been sick if I try to wear it too close to my face) so I thought for sure that we had wasted a lot of clay doing this.

However - once we started tessellating - magic happened! Here are the four tessellations from the ugly mess above. I'll be covering a tin with the canes (what else is new?) and making a luggage tag for Mom with them once I get some more inspiration.

They remind me a bit of playing cards. I think I'll try to make some earrings with them once I reduce the size and then I might not mind the black so much.

As far as Judy's DVD goes - even with the beginning cane stuff I learned a couple of techniques that I hadn't heard of though where she really grabbed my interest was with the tessellated and quilting canes. I won't share the simple tips with you to encourage you to buy the DVD but the one obvious one that I hadn't been doing is cutting and baking a slice of each cane that I make and saving it. Judy shows hers in a clear glass bowl - I think I'm going to have to start doing that.

Next up - my New Year's hugely involved clay project.

Cheers,

Sandy