Eye canes - Week 6 of canes

Hi Everyone,

The photos in this blog entry are not mine. Please read on.

Through OWOH I've been visiting sites of other artists and have been paying attention to those that have left comments. Sue C of Chasing Rainbows, Too has left a few comments on some of my blog entries so I started perusing her blog. She's introduced me to a number of things including Selkirk Rex Cats. She's also got some great links to other clayers, one of whom I'm excited to be writing about in a future post.

Sue C does canes and I was intrigued by her mention of eye canes and she posts several photos of the initial process here and here. She promises that the picture above will transform itself into an eye cane. At first I had no idea how she was going to do that, and I still don't. But she does show what an eye cane looks like in one of her first blog entries. And here they are.

I'm looking forward to future entries on how she transforms the pixels above to the eye canes later on. I think it sounds like an entry for Polymer Cafe.

Please take a wander through Sue C's blog.



Cheers,

Sandy

Bottle 1 - Happy Anniversary

Hi Everyone,

I'm happy to say that I've started my donations towards the Bottles of Hope Program as promised in my One World One Heart posting and yesterday presented 13 bottles at our Southern Ontario Polymer Clay Guild. I'll post photos of the other 12 later this week.

Today is my wedding anniversary. My husband and I have been married for 16 years today. We got married on a beach in Costa Rica. My husband is my soulmate, my heart, and my greatest love. This year also marks the point where I met him half of my lifetime ago. We met on a canoe trip hosted by the Ottawa Hostelling Association. Full moons, loons, magic. I am very lucky marriage wise though I know many aren't.

Anyhow, through the OWOH program I found Whimsical Creations by Melanie. I'm not sure what number she is on the Magic Carpet Ride, but she does beautiful work with clay and you can see her giveaway here. It's very clean and, well, whimsical. I loved her cake ornaments, an example of which is found here, and thought that it might make a nice Bottle. Even though I'm sure that my technique was quite different than Melanie's, I won't go into too many details. Scrap clay was my base, and then no different than a fondant application, I put a layer of the coloured clay on the scrap clay. I cut out the centre of the cake to be able to put the bottle in with Kemper cutters that were almost the perfect size. The polka dots (I wonder where that term came from) are there to cover some of the defects.

As also promised, I am dedicating the first 100 Bottles on behalf of the first 100 entrants in my OWOH giveaway. My very first entrant is Quiltmoose - Dagmar. She does beautiful quilting work, resides in Germany and is also a geocacher. Coincidentally she also has a post about a zipper bag that I hadn't seen before yesterday when Patti brought hers in to show us at Guild. I wonder how many times that'll show up in the next while.

Anyhow, that's about it for today. I was going to take the day to work at home since my husband has been away for the last five days but he's informed me that I have to be there, so I suspect I'm getting a nice bouquet. We'll go out to dinner tonight and have a quiet evening.

It's going to be a good day.

Cheers,

Sandy

Sunrise, sunset - week five of canes

Hi Everyone,

I'll be teaching landscape canes at Guild at the end of February. Here's one I put together just for fun - I had some scrap clay that I decided to see what would happen if I skinner blended. It turned into a nice sunrise/sunset sky. Started adding the land and then thought it should have a sun.

I'm happy with it and looking forward to seeing it reduced more. I'm saving the reduction for class though. I'm not sure if I'll lose the detail of the land colours as I reduce. We'll see.

I forgot to put my penny in the photo. Cane is about 2 inch wide by 3/4 inch tall at the moment.

All told this one took less than an hour to put together, but that's an unusually fast cane for me. It's all about cookie cutters.

Expect to see more landscape canes over the next few weeks as I practice my demos for Guild.

Cheers,

Sandy

We interrupt our normal programming...Operation Beautiful

Hi Everyone,

I lurk at a few other sites that have nothing to do with claying. One of them is from Rachel who is trying to reconcile the journey of learning to live without children and writes poignant blog entries about the very difficult struggle. That's really beside the point, but one of her postings was about Operation Beautiful which is more the point.

Operation Beautiful was started by Caitlin and you can read more about the whole story here.

I posted the link on my Facebook page saying that I would be partipating in the near future. Little did I know that my first real experience with it would be from my brother Mark.

Mark is my youngest brother. He is 13 years younger than me and bears a striking resemblance to the character on the Nintendo DS Brain Age games. He is a tall gentle quiet giant that gets lost when it comes to the right words to say in awkward situations. However, he's very big on hugs, silent companionship, and the occasional simple text message of "I love you". He is wonderful and his hugs are the best, the kind that squish you and surround you and make you feel safe.

This photo is of the text message that he sent me a couple of days ago, I'm guessing after he saw my FB posting. I had my phone on silent so I didn't see it until yesterday morning when I was preparing for a big meeting that was sure to be full of confrontation and exasperation. I ended up smiling all day long.

I offer Mark's text message to all of you, I'm sure he won't mind. All of you have visited my blog, many have left comments, and many have made me smile. You are each and everyone beautiful and I am fortunate to have found a way to have you in my life, even if it's sometimes only very peripherally.

You, my blog readers, are beautiful. Thank you for making my life richer.

Sandy

One World One Heart, week 4 of canes...

It's One World One Heart Time!!!!



For those of you unfamiliar with OWOH, it started in 2007 by the Whimsical Bohemian with fewer than 100 participants and in two years it grew to over 900 participants in 2009. I'm excited to see what 2010 brings. I participated in 2009 and gave away clay covered tins. Through the experience I was fortunate to meet Renee and a few other women. The event is meant to encourage bloggers around the world to connect with each other.

The theme this year for One World One Heart is Magic Carpet. My interpretation of magic carpets turned into three pairs of earrings made with canes that I've created. Earring findings are surgical steel. Here are the three pairs. If you're unfamiliar with canes, please see my blog entry here for some great cane links and here for a bit more pictorial on some canes that I made.

I'll pick three names randomly late on February 15th from people who leave a comment between now and the closing time. People can have until noon Eastern Standard Time on February 15 to leave a comment.

If you want to see other Canadian clayers participating in the event, go over to the Clayamies website and check out the links there.





I'll also commit to making up to 100 Bottles of Hope throughout the year that will be donated to local hospitals and I'll name them publicly on my blog for the first 100 entrants on my website (if I get that many). Since many of you will be new to the idea of Bottles of Hope, they're clay covered medicine bottles that are given to cancer patients. The history of Bottles of Hope can be found here. My bottles may not all be cane related, but here is an example of ones that are covered with canes. You can see other examples of some of my bottles here, here, and my personal all time favourite here. One of my friends, Louise, does very creative bottles so if you're in the mood for a smile, stop by and see her bottles here.



I will post the winners some time during the evening of the 15th of February.


My rules - there are only two:

1. My giveaway is only open to active bloggers and website owners. You must have a blog or website (Etsy, Flickr, and other such sites count) that I can visit. It doesn't have to be artsy, and half the fun last year was seeing the myriad of topics that people cover out there.
2. You must leave a comment on this blog entry with your e-mail address or a way of contacting you.
   

In terms of e-mails, I generally hate leaving my e-mail out in a public domain and I'm sure others of you feel the same way. However, I know that I'll be entering other people's giveaways so I've created a special e-mail for myself through gmail which has the initials owoh in the e-mail address and I'll be leaving that as my contact. Another way of leaving an address is to use the format where you spell out the at sign and the dot symbol. For example: sandy123owoh at hotmail dot com. I will consider that format acceptable for finding you.


Thanks so much to Lisa who created this wonderful event and has the dedication, kindness and spirit. What a wonderful way to touch people.

Cheers, good luck, and happy blog and website surfing. Here's to new friends and linking up with old friends. Let the fun begin!

My thumb hurts, week 3 of canes...

Hi Everyone,

While looking up sites for last week's caning entry, I came across the following tutorial from Canespinner designs. It's for a geometric cane that can be created with an extruder. I thought it would be interesting to try.

In looking at my canes that I've got collected for my big project, I decided that I wanted some more browns in there. So here are my canes from the tutorial.

The reason that my thumb hurts is that the extruder that I've got is one of the Makin's green ones. Since I'm using Kato clay, a stiffer clay, turning the handle on the extruder requires almost a death grip on the body of the extruder. I didn't realize that I had formed a decent sized blister on my thumb until it was too late.

I got my husband to do the last extrusion.

I'm not really happy with my choice of browns, but I do think this would make an excellent faux wood inlay for something and it turns out that it does work well with the project canes. I tried creating other patterns with the extruded clay but I wasn't particularly creative and ended up not doing anything spectacular.



Please check out the rest of Canespinner Designs' website. I'm in love with his frames and they might inspire me in the future. He also does beautiful bracelets and other things.

Cheers,

Sandy

A caning primer, week 2 of canes

Hi Everyone,

One of my regular visitors, Lea, asked about caning. She wanted to know what it was and what reductions were. So, as a courtesy to Lea, this week's caning blog entry tackles the idea of canes. Since the rest of my caning blog entries will likely focus on my canes, I thought it would be nice to offer some exceptional caners' work.

Caning is the process of making a log of cane colours into a picture that you can slice through so that the pattern repeats itself through each slice. It's a lot like what you would do with the holiday themed sugar cookies that we get in the stores.

The easiest canes are the jelly roll canes and the layered canes. This tutorial from Polymer Clay Central, even shows you how to make a jelly roll cane without a pasta machine.

Speaking of Polymer Clay Central, they were one of my first sources of inspiration for caning, with over 30 tutorials on line for canes and a whole host of other projects. Another great site that I just discovered while researching the topic is Craft Stew's compilation of caning tutorials. Some of the canes on this site are repeats of the Polymer Clay Central site, but there are others.

There are many other caning sites around. In Canada, our own Wanda Shum does a spectacular job on canes and it's always a treat to get one of her cane slices in the mail. I've already written a few times about Louise's caning ability. One person I haven't mentioned previously very much is Adria who I get to see every year in Morrisburg. The large butterfly cane pictured here is one of her creations. Click on her link to see how delicate these become. I've written before about 2 Good Claymates. They have some tutorials on caning if you look at their sidebar. While you're at it, take a look at some of their new buttons. I'm sure that there are many other Canadian caners but these are the ones I thought of off the top of my head.



While looking to write this article I browsed a lot on the web. I found this cute little cane tutorial by Kim Korringa Designs on how to do fish here. I think the bodies of the fish would lend themselves very nicely to monsters.

Once you master the caning basics, it then becomes time to move onto bigger and better things. It's important to note that not all canes start out as large as the ones below. Most of mine would be in the 2 inch wide by 2 thick wide by 2 inch tall size. Some smaller, some larger. But I like these examples because they're fun to look at and not something you'd normally see in class.

Here are some examples of very large canes.

Bead Goodies posts an interesting tutorial on how to make what she calls a medium size cane (it's only 1.5 lbs) and reduce it in under 4 hours here. Please do click on her tutorial as she offers some contrasting opinions on how to reduce canes.

A very pretty cane cane that is 3 lbs before reduction is shown here at Kay's Creations. She's got some wonderful clay on her Flickr site. I love her Steam Punk Bottles of Hope and some of her canes are so cute.

For a truly absolutely deserving of reverence cane that is on the large size, check out Julie Eakes' cane here. She used an extruder and it took her 3 weeks to build. I cannot even fathom how to plan this thing. She does some amazing face canes which you can see in a slideshow here. Beautiful!



The reason that this blog entry is almost a week late is that I've spent a lot of time looking for one of my favourite videos on reducing canes and couldn't remember where to find it. Many google searches later and here it is. Kathy Gose shows how to reduce her cane in a slightly unconventional way here.


One of the most precise caners that I know of is Canin' Able. He's got a Flickr site that has some amazing photographs. I've copied a picture of how he does some of his reducing. This particular cane is over 7 lbs. You can read the details of this particular cane reduction here. You can also see some of the tools that he uses for his clay hobby on his Flickr website so take some time to browse there.

The last site that I want to mention for a tutorial and giant cane is Silly Millies. She does whimsical cartoon canes where the distortion adds to the character of the canes. I think she was the first commercial caner that I became aware of. You can see her YouTube videos here where she talks about reducing a cane and here.

If your canes come out terrible you can always post them to the Flickr Group Millefiori Gone Wrong. I just recently added my Poor Little Bear cane to the album.

It's literally taken me hours to write this posting. I'd get so far and then have to dash off into my clay room and play for a few minutes. I wouldn't get terribly much done, but it sure was distracting trying to write this.

Hope this is a good intro. There were so many entries that I could have posted here and it was hard to narrow it down to just a few photos and websites.

I've already got Week 3 lined up with a cane that I made while writing this entry. Week 4 will be my One World One Heart project and Week 5 is actually a discovery that I had tonight while playing around a bit.

Cheers,

Sandy