12/7/2023 0 Comments Translucent polymer clay canesYou should now have eight stripes in your stack. Stack one sheet on top of the other and roll through the thickest setting on your pasta machine.Ĭut the sheet in half and stack again. Start with a sheet of black polymer clay and a sheet of white polymer clay, both rolled out on the thickest setting on your pasta machine. Making and using polymer clay canes is a rewarding and useful skill.Steps To Making A Polymer Clay Striped Cane A recommended source of new cane tutorials is Meg Newberg’s Cane Builder Subscription.Ībove all, be patient, take your time, and enjoy. A good library of basic canes can be found in an old favorite site, Polymer Clay Central. Also, many complex canes are built from basic subunits like bullseye canes. Doing this will give you the basic skills for building, packing, and reducing canes. Even though complex designs are tempting, learn to make simple canes first. A simple google search will reveal tons of them. There are thousands of cane tutorials out there. (Learn more about brands of clay in my article here.) Learning to Make Canes Canes need to be “conditioned” before slicing and the reduction process takes care of that nicely. If using Fimo Professional, don’t reduce your canes until you use them. For those canes, artists often prefer to use Fimo Professional or Kato Polyclay. While it is a great brand for making free-form canes, Sculpey Souffle doesn’t allow the fine detail needed for complex picture canes. Sculpey III is too soft for making any but the simplest canes. Which Clay to Use for Making Canes?īecause there can be lots of distortion when reducing canes, it’s best that a soft and smooshy brand of clay is not used. Alice Stroppel’s Cane Mapping technique is an example of this process. One fun way to use canes is when the slices themselves are treated as components to “paint” a picture in a sort of mosaic style. An example would be to create a signature emblem for signing polymer clay artwork. Canes are used anytime you want to create the same design over and over. Cane slices can be shaped to make sculptural forms, perhaps with each slice forming the petal of a flower. Sheets of millefiori designs can be used to cover things such as crochet hook handles, tin lids, or small boxes. Slices of square canes can be arranged like tiles to make a uniform surface. How Use Polymer Clay CanesĪ their most simple, you can cut a slice of a polymer clay cane and pierce it to form a bead. Canes pictured are from Ivy Niles of IKandiClay, Matt Kernan of Clay by Kerm, and Toni and Ed Street. They stick well to the glass sheet I’ve placed in the bottom and that allows them to remain vertical. You can group your canes by type or artist. Personally, I like to keep them in scrapbooking boxes, as you can see in this article here. The trick is to find a way that lets you see what you have without allowing them to get dirty or stick together. There are many favorite ways to store canes. This is not a cane: Storing Polymer Clay Canes Yes, I know that many new makers are calling this a cane. But the design is essentially the same.Ī compressed log of chopped clay is not a cane. Yes, some variable canes do involve a color change throughout the length. Just like a roll of slice-and-bake cookie dough, every slice of a cane will have the same image. However, canes are long logs of clay that have an image running down the whole thing. I guess I’m the pedant that gets picky about what people call things. In addition to the basic canes above, there are also “famous” canes such as the Pixelated Retro Cane by Bettina Welker and the Stroppel Cane by Alice Stroppel. Bullseye Cane Jellyroll Cane Flame Cane Retro Cane Leaf Canes Flower Canes Butterfly Canes Kaleidoscope Canes Round Kaleidoscope Cane I’ve collected some common ones here so you can get an idea of what they’re called. There are hundreds of “standard” cane designs, such as flower (rose, pansy, etc.) or leaf canes. Millefiori buttons and beads made from slices of polymer clay flower canes. When slices of polymer clay canes are arranged to make a field of flowers, this can be called millefiori. Millefiori is where many slices of murrine are arranged to make designs you’ve seen in glass paperweights and other traditional glass designs. Millefiori is an Italian term that means “thousand flowers” and is also borrowed from glassworking. Be aware that polymer clay canes are not correctly called millefiori. Polymer clay canes are similar in concept to murrine, which are glass canes used in traditional Venetian glassworking. This makes the diameter of the log smaller and the design smaller. A polymer clay cane can be reduced by squeezing and compressing. Slices from the cane will reveal a design and all slices from the cane will have identical designs. A polymer clay cane is a log of polymer clay that’s made with a design that runs the entire length of the log.
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