My Head Hurts, week 1 canes...

Hi Everyone,

With the weather outside a chilly -17C, I took yesterday and spent the day caning. I started with an attempt at a Jon Anderson cane that had intrigued me. His version that shows up on a few of the pieces I own is the first photo in this entry. I was intrigued by the shading and how it looked 3D on a 2D plane. Simple enough to draw so I thought it would be simple to recreate.



Turns out I'm challenged in taking a 2D image and making it 3D in terms of a cane. Skinner blend portion was easy. Shaping the cup itself was easy. But it probably took me 20 minutes to figure out how to do the cup rim and the inner circle. Most of you are probably thinking "silly girl, it's simply a jelly roll around a skinner blend and flattened". Which is exactly what it is, but for whatever reason that concept was hard.

The next important thing was to reverse the blend from the cup to the inner circle. I kept doing that and then as I was adjusting the cane I'd somehow flip it. Started to reduce, realized that I had flipped it one too many times, and had to tear it apart to flip it. But I'm happy with the cane and you can see it in the 2nd image of this blog entry.

Reduction went well. I've decided that I'm a huge fan of creating a block of filler colour and then cutting out what I don't need to pack the cane instead of layers of packing. I'll explain that in detail in another posting but essentially I make the background block the same size that I want the cane to be, then cut out the bits that need to be filled in with the coloured portion of the cane. For me there's less distortion that way and it's quicker. I do end up with extra background colour, but that's easily used in other projects.



I had some scrap left over and played around a bit to make this second cane (which I'm still counting as cane week 1). It's tiny and I don't have too much of it, but enough likely to go around a tin or two.

I spent the better part of yesterday cataloging my canes by reducing them to 1/4 inch high and creating a sample piece that's 2 inches long. Since the goal of these canes is to cover tins, the 1/4 inch high works well and is visually interesting. The summary of those will likely be the topic of next week's posting.

Once my head stops hurting I'll try to tackle the cane below. I need to be fresh for this one I think.


Cheers,

Sandy