In my previous post, I declared that I had ‘found’ my next cane design.  As usual, I had planned to make a trial cane and work out all the details before presenting the steps to all my anxiously waiting readers.  Well, here it is a week later, I have a huge pile of scrap clay on my table, and I’m on my third attempt to make this thing !  I’ve seriously considered admitting defeat, and moving on to something else.  But being the obsessive person I am, once I begin a ’quest’, it is very difficult to give it up !  For example, I will visit dozens of stores- both on the Internet and the brick and mortar variety-in search of one particular item.  Whether I really need it or not is irrelevant!  A few years ago, I shopped relentlessly for a plain turquoise knit top with a crew neck  to wear with a polymer clay necklace I had made.  Most people buy jewelry to coordinate with their clothes, I buy clothes to wear with my jewelry !    After months of searching, I spotted the ‘perfect’ turquoise top at the local Kohl’s.  It was in my price range, and even better, it was machine washable !   I wanted to jump for joy.  You would’ve thought I’d won the lottery, LOL!

     Back to caning…I did a search for ‘hexagon designs’ on the Internet, and got thousands of  results, as you can imagine.  Floor tile websites, quilting websites, architecture, geometry, math websites, etc., you name it!  I spent several hours rather unsystematically clicking on any link that looked interesting.  One of my clicks brought me here:  http://joningram.org/blog/2008/08/the-joy-of-hex/.  It was a page from the blog of Jon Ingram, a teacher of mathematics in the UK.   His post begins:

>>>”Last summer I developed a bit of an obsession with hexagons. More specifically, with the patterns you can produce from tiling multiple copies of a single, simply decorated hexagonal tile:

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       Multiple patterns from a single tile design !!    It was like finding that turquoise sweater…the search was over !  Especially when  I got a look at some of the pattern possiblilities when I scrolled further.  Are these cool or what??? >>>

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     All I had to do was make one hexagon cane, and I would be in pattern heaven!  Just look at all the possibilites!  The hexagon pattern would be constructed from 3 equilateral triangle canes cut in half, mirrored, and then reduced:

        These triangles don’t look very complicated, do they?    Well, that’s what I thought……………..That’s why this is only Part I !   I’m not giving up……….yet !