My head is really starting to hurt - week 10 of canes

Hi Everyone,

I tend to think of myself as a caner, and a reasonably capable one, but every so often I get completely humbled by my attempts. That was the case today.

I decided to tackle the dreaded Jon Anderson spiral cane that I featured here and which you can see in the above photo. I was feeling pretty good about it. At lunch earlier this week I spent some time sketching it out and figuring out exactly how it was supposed to go together. Easier than I thought it would be.

Yesterday I started experimenting with colours, trying to decide what colour scheme I wanted to use. I've got four separate examples of this particular cane on my Jon Anderson figures each with a different colour pallette. Ultimately, with the landscape canes that I've been playing with I thought it would be nice to have a simple blue and white skinner blend version. But that decision alone probably took me two or three hours. I now have some very nice other skinner blend plugs that will also come in useful.

Blue and white skinner blend, no problem. Trying to decide on the spiral colour, a few different approaches but ultimately happy with this choice. One of the choices, the red white and blue flat cane that you see in the photo, I've decided maybe to incorporate into the cane as the base.

Where things really started to go sideways for me was in the assembly. Generally assembly isn't a problem but I am very much rotationally challenged. I've never been good at figuring out that if I just rotated by 45 degrees or flip-flopped or whatever other thing there is to do that would create the effect that I want. I find that particularly true with skinner blends and today was incredibly difficult. I referenced the sample cane frequently and it's amazing how I had to have it oriented just right even to get a sense on what I was trying to do.

So here's where I got today. It's not perfect by any means and at this point I'm now trying to decide on the background. I'm going to let it sit for a couple of days and think about it. I'm leaning towards a brown or gold although I know that the white would be cleaner. But I'm a bit bored with blue and white.

For now it's time for a break to give my head a much more needed rest than I was expecting. I've got to do something with the top a bit and make the point of the white blend match the spiral a bit more. I think all that is is a bit of mooshing.

Maybe the finished product will be next week's entry. I suspect it's going to take some trial and effort to decide what colour to use as background. Colours were difficult this time around.

We'll see.

Cheers,

Sandy