Cane for the Week of 1/11/09

     Happy New Year to all !!! I don’t know about you, but I am keeping my fingers crossed that 2009 is a better year for this planet than 2008 was!  I avoid making New Year’s resolutions because I already beat myself enough for all the things I ‘should ‘ be doing.  However if I did make resolutions, one of them would be to post my “Cane of the Week” feature every week !  But it is a resolution that I doubt I can keep.  I don’t worry too much about not coming up with ideas for canes, because I think about cane designs a lot  (the shower is my favorite place for visualizing new canes, and I take long showers, LOL!), but editing photos and uploading them to this blog is another story.  It is a painfully slow, tedious, and frustrating process for me.  If only I had an assistant to do this !  At the very least, it would be nice to be able to compose the entire blog off line and paste the whole thing, text, photos, captions and all, into WordPress.  Maybe there is a way to do that, but I certainly haven’t figured it out, and don’t have the $$ to hire someone to teach me.

      Anyway, this week I was playing around with a cane design that starts with a Skinner blend roll.  Here are some slices of the cane using various color combinations.  For want of a better term, I will call it my ‘anemone cane’  because it reminds me of a sea anemone. 

        Like most polymer clay canes, I’m sure others have made a cane similar or identical to this one, so I’m not claiming ‘ownership’ of this design.   Besides the different color combinations, I also varied the procedure slightly, either on purpose or by accident !  I must admit that a lot of my designs are derived from mistakes and screw ups.    I now present to you the steps for making my anemone cane, specifically the yellow one shown in the above photo.  Instead of captions, I took the lazy way out and wrote the steps on sticky notes.  Hopefully, they are legible !  My closeup vision stinks, but I actually found the stickies to be easier to read than the captions.  Some of the photos have no notes or captions, but I think they are pretty much self-explanatory.

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I cut the Skinner roll in half to make 2 pieces.

One roll was left intact (one on right), the other was divided as shown at the left. Now there are 4 pieces.

So there you have it !  Not too difficult, except for getting the ‘spokes’ to meet exactly in the center!