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.

Be Still...

Hello Everyone,

Today's topic is more about resources than about technique since I did a direct copy of something I saw that I liked.

We get the Signals Catalogue at home and I fell in love with this plaque a while ago for whatever reason. However, it's $90 and only made out of resin. If it had been made out of pewter or other metal I might have purchased it from the catalogue.

But, I have these wonderful metallic powders from Daniel Smith (if you're at all a painter you should visit the site and they have some really neat textured papers that I'm thinking about ordering) and a ton of scrap clay so I thought I would make one for myself instead. These powders are a little different from the Perfect Pearls and Pearl Ex powders in that you can do blending one colour on top of another so you can get the subtle shifts of colour. You do have to seal the clay afterwards because the pigment does rub off after a while. All I needed was a way of putting the letters into the clay.

We're lucky enough in our Southern Ontario Polymer Clay Guild to have Bev Larose who has a printing company. She's been generating custom stamps for us for a while at the incredibly reasonable price of $10 for a 6 inch by 4 inch stamp (and as an added bonus, if she likes the stamp well enough she'll let you have it for free as long as you let her make as many as she wishes). So, I had her make me a stamp of this and made my own plaque. She's developing a website and once she gets it up and running I'll make sure it gets posted here. I also had her make me a Christmas stamp which I'm going to use in the Clayamies Christmas ornament swap.

Here's my first attempt. I love the torn edges of mine. One thing that is really obvious is the roller marks on the clay from my Mona Kissel Atlas Pasta Machine (but I think it's common to most machines and I wouldn't give up this pasta machine for twice what I paid for it). I find that it leaves these marks at the thicker pasta machine settings. I'll play around some more to see if I can get rid of the marks. I tried brayering it but that wasn't very successful.

There are some subtle differences between mine and Signals in the emphasis of the words which I hadn't realized until I posted the photos side by side.

Overall I'm happy with the concept, just have to perfect it a bit by getting rid of the roller marks. I have lots of clay and lots of powder so I'm sure it'll come together. I rarely so obviously plagiarize a product but I do like having it around.

Cheers,

Sandy

Francophone blogs...they're beautiful!

Hello Everyone,

As I've mentioned before, I have a particular fondness for Louise's blog from Montreal. Tonight I decided to follow her links to other bloggers and I've discovered that there's a whole host of beautiful polymer clay blogs in French. However, you don't need to understand French to be able to look at the photos.

A good starting point is Parole de Pate/. It appears to be sort of like Polymer Clay Daily except in French and points to interesting artwork. If you click on the Index General on the left where the links are, you'll end up at a whole host of tutorials, including an incredibly simple (much more simple than my technique) cane by Magali.

On the right hand side of the page is a listing of blogs and oh my goodness, you can really get lost for hours in that page. Many of us Canadian clay bloggers are new at this, but the French have been participating for years


The Hidden Magic technique seems to be a theme at the moment and there is some beautiful work by a couple of artists including this bracelet from Marie Pier/




and these samples from Pluie de Perles.







And, I probably spent an hour on http://bounette.canalblog.com/ just looking at the images. I tend towards a blue palette but I'm not generally keen on florals. However, I loved the work on the website, particularly this image. She uses a lot of different techniques and it's easy to get lost in the photos.

So go out and play with the Francophone side of things. I've only captured a small portion of it, but there are literally dozens of websites to explore.

Enjoy,

Sandy

P.S. I apologize for the choppiness of the photos and paragraphs. I haven't yet figured out how to do these things smoothly.

Learning about Blog Features - Technorati

This morning I'm relaxing and playing with Blogger. It mentioned some of the Blogging communities that are out there to join. This posting is about Technorati. Right now I'm following instructions on it which are telling me to create a blog and paste the following code:

Technorati Profile

From what I can tell, Technorati allows you to get your blog out there to more people and it also has a feature that allows you to be notified when your favourite blogs are updated. The website gives instructions on how to add a button that allows you to be notified whenever I update my blog. I've added it here but don't know how to add it to the rest of my page.



We'll see. I have a few more things to play with so there may be multiple not-very-exciting posts today.


Cheers,

Sandy

We finally have a dishwasher!!

This is just a short post and has nothing to do with clay though has a lot to do with my general mood.

In January this year our still-under-warrantee dishwasher started spewing water all over the floor. Three attempts to repair, at least 45 phone calls, many of which weren't returned and one letter to the president of the manufacturer, we finally have a replacement dishwasher installed. It's been a long and extremely frustrating process. If it hadn't been a top of the line dishwasher we probably would have just spent the money to buy a new one.

Our new dishwasher has blue LED lights on the inside that glow when you open the dishwasher. Not sure of the purpose but they make a cool night light in the kitchen. We've also been trying to figure out whether they turn off when we close the door (we feel like cartoon cavemen seeing a refrigerator for the first time).

What I learned from this process is that I should have started documenting as soon as we called the repair guy in the first time. I also believed everyone I spoke with but it turns out I shouldn't have.

But, since I hate, hate, hate doing dishes (it's a toss up on whether I hate sanding or dishes more, but I can avoid sanding), now that I have a dishwasher my mood has improved considerably and that's always a good thing.

Cheers,

Sandy

Snowflake cane samples

Hello Everyone,

My class was switched to this month so I've been creating some samples to show for class. I'm fortunate enough to have a couple of other clayers (Barb and Karen) in the neighborhood and we got together last week to see if my technique was teachable and just to play in general.

Below are some of the samples that we made. I've mentioned in previous posts about how tinting the translucent with Pinata ink causes bleeding. You can see it in bottom dark blue samples of the photo below. They're not out of focus, that's how hazy they've become in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the scrap clay that I've generated from that cane, might make some neat wave scenes or something.

While I'm not overly keen on the translucent snowflakes that I made (I think I like sharp edges rather than rounded edges in the cuts), it did make a cool ornament. I've backlit it in one photo and the other photo is front lit. I've added some shiny bits in the inside of the ornament.

And here are a couple of more samples.


I'm teaching the class this coming Sunday at our monthly Southern Ontario Polymer Clay Guild meeting. I'll post more photos after we're done.

Cheers,

Sandy

I dub thee, Marla's Method!

Hi All,

In one of my previous posts I mentioned that I had been lucky to attend a class by Marla Frankenburg. I've also mentioned that I was trying to figure out how to reduce my snowflake cane.

While Marla was walking around the class I asked her if she had any advice on how to reduce stubby triangle canes (which is what you get with the snowflake cane). She thought about it for about 30 seconds and suggested that I use something flat to help out with the reducing. She'd never tried it but thought it might work.

I'm pleased to announce that I've tried it a few times and last night had the opportunity to teach it to Barb and Karen with terrific success.

And, because one of the great things about clayers is the constant tribute to others who inspire us, I'm happy to thank her and to name this Marla's Method. It's a limited technique for now because it only really applies to triangle canes that are too short to reduce easily using the typical pull and stretch method, but I'm sure people can adapt it (maybe to a hexagonal cane to keep the edges?).

Here it is:
Position your clay triangle against the edge of your tile (for whatever reason the photos make it look like I've got a beveled tile, but I don't).

Use a glass coaster or some other flat stiff piece and position it against the side of the triangle (see images).

Push down with your hands (in the photo there's only one hand, but that's because I was using the other to take the photo) and give it a bit of a wiggle as you push.

After a few seconds, remove the coaster, and rotate the triangle such that the surface in contact with the bottom is in contact with the coaster and the surface that was in contact with the coaster is now free (on the left in the photos). Repeat and rotate.

You're likely stronger pushing with one of your hands than the other, so every so often pick the cane up and rotate it 180. For example, in this series of photos the cane face that's showing in the photos would now become the cane face away from the photo (clear?). You'll see what I mean when you try it out.



Eventually the triangle cane will be long enough that you can start to use the stretch and pull method for typical triangle canes. What's really cool about it is that none of us had very much end distortion at all.

And that's it - the Marla Method!

Oh, and by the way, the blue is translucent tinted with Pinata Ink. Don't do that! The Pinata ink starts to bleed in the cane and all the sharp edges become somewhat blurred. I'm leaving them as experiments to see how long it takes to generate just a pure blue cane.