Extruded spirals - week 12 of canes

Hi Everyone,

Surfingcat's blog has many interesting articles and is a prolific blogger, with 37 entries for March alone. She does a lot of experiments and posts the results. She's also a caner and favours Kato clay so she's a woman after my own heart. She posts her canes including the paisley cane that you can see here.



Anyhow, one of her recent blog entries was about using the extruder to create a cane. She had a unique approach to it that I thought would be fun to try. You can see her attempt here.

For some reason I can't leave comments on her blog so I e-mailed her and asked if it would be OK to post my experimentation on my blog. She's readily agreed and here is my attempt.

I started off by extruding four different colours of clay through the square extruder disc so that I had four long square shaped extruded clay snakes (first photo).


Then I combined the four different extruded bits to make a long four coloured square cane (second photo). I then re-extruded this coloured square through the square disc. I wasn't terribly impressed with the efforts - you can see my attempt to make a bigger cane with them in the upper right of the third photo. Surfingcat had e-mailed me to let me know that her other attempts hadn't been very exciting either so I wasn't too discouraged.

But I noticed that the dregs of the extruder provided these neat spirals and I wondered if I could replicate it. This is where I start to depart from Surfingcat's technique.



Gave the original assembled four logs a few twists and re-extruded. Spirals all the way through! But fewer so in the beginning. So then on the last try I twisted even more. Got spirals at the beginning and by the end they were very much spiraled, almost to the point of looking like extruder canes with different colours of circles. I suspect the correct amount of spiraling is somewhere in between the two levels I've shown. I didn't photograph the second spiraling attempt as it wasn't terribly different from the first spiralled attempt.



Then created this cane with the bits of spirals and original extrusions to make a larger cane. It looks quite nice on Bottles of Hope. I've done four Bottles of Hope with the canes and I'll post photos of those later.

I'd like to try this with blues and whites, I think it would make a wonderful wave that could be incorporated as borders or into a sea scene for a landscape cane.

There might be other variations and it was a fun couple of hours (I'm slow at choosing colours) so thanks so much to Surfingcat for coming up with the original approach!

Cheers,

Sandy