Paw Prints finalized...

Hello Everyone, Ju-Li from Germany left me a comment about her paw canes. Once I saw her beautiful work, I had to finish mine. I had already picked the colours and had a general idea.

So here are the steps to the finished cane. I've got a lot of the single claw cane and realized that I hadn't made enough brown to finish the cane the way I wanted to so I have enough of the double prints to work with the project (I hope) but not a lot to spare. The scanning removes a lot of the green. The cane is actually more green than white inside the paw prints.

I took a long time deciding what colour background to use. I really liked the Kato metallic gold as a background but couldn't figure out how to make it without metallic in it. I was worried for two parts, the mica shifting and the softness of the metallics.

I tried pale backgrounds but they didn't offer a lot of contrast. Ultimately I took another look at Jon Anderson's work and decided that having some dark colours would work well for the type of project that I'm doing.



I used the remnants of the clay to make some Judy Belcher canes. The canes on the left are the pure canes from her technique. The canes on the right are the canes generated with a scrap clay technique that then takes on Judy's technique. I'll use all the canes in the project, the darker ones on the right will be useful for around the paw prints. These are small canes, less than a half inch in height.

I've figured out my next cane, at least in concept, and I should be able to use the paw prints there. It'll be based on Dagoli clothing, the Mystic Bear pattern. I don't have a decent photo of it and anything I can pull of the web doesn't enlarge well.

That one will be a couple of weeks in the making.

The theme for the project appears to be inspired by the North. Hey, maybe I'll start calling the project Northern Inspirations. How cheesy is that?

Cheers,

Sandy

My next project cane - paw prints...

Hi Everyone,

I've decided on a pattern for my next cane for my project. It's going to be paw prints. Here's what I'm using as my template which I created using scavenged clip art and Microsoft Powerpoint. I'm not sure on the background colour yet, but the paws will be a skinner blend dark green to either white or tan and then wrapped with a dark blue and white combination to give it some punch. I may make the background tan or I may make it blue.

Not sure how long this will take, it's basically a jelly roll skinner blend shaped into paw prints. The hard part will be the surrounding clay - I hate packing clay around irregular shapes.

Might be a few weeks before I get it done, but it's nice to have the design figured out.

Cheers,

Sandy

Canada goose cane...

Hello Everyone,

I've got my first project canes completed. If you look at the previous post you'll see the stained glass pattern that I used to complete the Canada goose cane.

I took some of the remainder of the clay and did a Judy Belcher tesselated cane series. Now I have five canes that will work together. The tesselated canes are not at all intuitive. I literally have to carry my stuff over to the TV and follow along with Judy's video. Perhaps by the third or fourth attempt I'll finally understand it on my own. Judy's video is amazing.

I'm OK with the goose, not thrilled, but not upset - it came out about what I expected though in hindsight I probably should have used a more brilliant blue but we'll see what the overall effect is once I get the rest of the canes made.

I'm now going to look for a nice bear pattern either in stained glass or in the intarsia patterns. That'll be my next project.

Cheers,

Sandy

My New Year's project

Hi Everyone,

I thought I'd start the new year actually planning a project. I've been madly in love with Jon Anderson's Fimo Creations/ ever since I saw his work in San Diego. So I'd like to try doing something similar. I love his colour schemes and the intricacy in his work.



I don't think I want to do an animal shape, so I've decided to cover a Werther's Christmas tin instead.










I'm now looking for inspiration for canes. I know for sure that I'm going to use the Tesselated Canes from Judy Belcher.


I also know that I want to incorporate Mike Buesseler style landscape canes/ into the work.















I think I'll also use some of my stained glass patterns to generate canes. Here's the first one that I want to try.



I think for now I need to start with a big whack of conditioned clay in the colours that I want. That should be interesting.

I'll post updates along the way but I expect this to be a six month project. I'm hoping to generate 20-30 canes.

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

Squashed cane technique

Hello Everyone,

I thought I'd take some time to play with the Vice-Versa or Squashed Cane Technique that I mentioned earlier from Domicreative.

You can view her tutorial here:



I think I can easily fall in love with this technique. It's dead easy and it doesn't use up a lot of clay to try it. It is a version of mokume gane but you don't end up with very much left over to turn into scrap.

My first attempt was a blue pallette. I wanted to be reminded of the Caribbean. I'll start with the back first since I was hoping to use it as the front. I used my new stamp that I had Bev create which uses words from our wedding ceremony in Costa Rica.

When I skimmed this side, I really didn't like it. The stamp was too small and the colours really seemed to clash. I don't think the silver was a good choice to add to the plug.


I used a different Bev stamp for the front and I liked this one very much. I think a bold stamp is required.

I'll turn these into earrings but I don't know how yet since I haven't mastered the art of wiring to my satisfaction.



My next attempt involved a jewel tone pallette. I have a stamp block of different leaf patterns that I love and I thought these would be perfect for this stamp. I'm extremely happy with these but I found the pinky cream colour that shows on the back (which is why it became the back) really didn't go with the rest of the colours. I like a bit of contrast when I do things but I'm finding with this technique it has to be the right contrast.

Other things that I noticed while doing this is that you can't cut too deep, otherwise you lose the effect of the pattern. And, if you're particularly fond of a colour, make that a thicker first plug and it should slide through most of the extrusion and be the colour of the outside of the extrusion. That'll stay as the colour that doesn't get cut away.



Don't forget to take the scrapings and put them on another piece of clay (very much like the mokume gane technique). You can end up with some interesting patterns with those as well.




I had an idea that the colour chips that come from paint stores might provide some inspiration. Here's a sample of some of the chips that we've got at home. I think four or five colours that look nice on a colour chip would look nice for this technique and would avoid the oops that sometimes happens.


I want to play some more. I always love earrings and this might be a neat way to create them.

Cheers,

Sandy

Christmas ornaments past and present

Hello Everyone,

I thought I'd post photos of the ornaments that I made for the Clayamies Ornament Exchange.

This first ornament is one that I made for last year's swap. The swap theme was whimsy. I made all of the canes and then put them onto the ornament.


The small black oval that you see in the middle is actually a piece of the Holiday Specs 3D glasses. These are pretty cool and they look like the image below. I simply cut out small pieces and put them into the ornament. Surprisingly they baked really well.



When you looked through the ornament at Christmas lights, you saw something like the image below.




This year's ornament used up a lot of my Santa cane that I made earlier. If you click on the photo you can see the detail of how I combined the Christmas carol stamp with the cane work.



For the back I used Lisa Pavelka's waterslide transfer paper. Overall I'm happy with the results but I did have a few problems with it. In some cases the water smeared the ink and I had to re-print the label or decide that it was close enough. In other cases there was a lot of bubbling after baking even though the piece went into the oven looking perfect. I think it might be due to the clay shrinking but not the transfer.


I have to admit that I didn't follow instructions exactly because I didn't cover the transfer with a bit of TLS before baking. I don't remember why I didn't do this but I think next time I would because I had a couple of cases where the label simply popped off after a couple of coats of Future floor polish.

I'll play with the transfers some more at some point.



And that's the posting for this week. Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season.

Sandy