Polymer Clay Kaleidoscope Cane Tutorial

Hello, Donna here. Welcome to my channel and day four of kaleidoscope caning. Um, kaleidoscope canes are wonderful. They can be quite beautiful at the hands of artists like Carol Simmons and Janna Roberts-Benson and, uh, Cara Jane Heyman. They can be just absolutely wonderful and they can be a perfect way to use your old canes up. Um, the reason why this is day four is because, well, day one I made these and I just swept in, took my old cane, slapped them together without thinking much about it, reduced, uh, put them back together and I made these, which I consider kind of meh, just really ordinary and probably not worth the effort that it took for me to reduce them. And, um, you know, I mean, it's like, okay, it's a kaleidoscope, but it's not very interesting. And that makes sense, doesn't it? Because I really didn't think about it at all when I did it. And I think you have to think about, about what you're doing. There are things you have to consider. Otherwise you end up with things that, yeah, maybe you like it, maybe you don't. In this case, I'm not real fond of these canes. Uh, I have made really nice kaleidoscope canes, but I have to confess to you, those have been accidents. So day two was dedicated to figuring out a way for me to design kaleidoscope canes and have predictable results and end up with things I like while using my leftover canes. So I ended up actually making this one and this is what it ended up looking like after I had reduced it and pushed it down. Uh, is this the one? Yeah, I guess it is. It is the one. So, um, and, and you know what? I would have continued to accept that my camera didn't shoot one whole section. So I had to set these aside and start day three. This was day three. Let me see where I've got. Oh, this was day three. Now, by now I had run out of leaves. So I was making leaves. I had run out of this. So I had to make it. I wasn't even using old canes anymore. The butterfly wings are old. This is old. This is fairly old, moderately old, but you know, I had to start making components because by day three, I had no, I had no, um, no leaves left. Okay. So I did this and then I made the cane. I made the background darker. Uh, but then when I was wrapping and doing some detailed work, my hands were like down here. Just imagine what that was like. And so rather than try to reproduce just the parts that I had done down here, I decided I better make day four. So here we are day four, kaleidoscope caning. Now I did learn things through the process of doing these many days. And that was that I have a lot of sort of floral elements. So my kaleidoscope cane, canes, days one, two, three, and today, uh, are going to have this, uh, sort of floral look to them. Now, rather than just slapping them together and hoping everything comes out right, I decided that I would design the cane before I made it. And the best way for me is to take the elements I have. I have three petals. I have two, two dragonfly wings. I have one dragonfly body. And all of these are enough clay for me to make my cane. I only have this much of this little, um, broken jelly roll. So you'll notice in my design palette, I've only cut one slice. I've only got this much of this little cane. Therefore my design palette only has one piece. Maybe I'd like to use a lot more of this, but I only have this much. So I can only use it once, right? Leaves I've got. I got leaves for days because I had to make new ones. So these are my basic elements, the elements I'm going to use in my next kaleidoscope cane. So first I'm going to take my dragonfly wings and I'm going to position them where I want them. And I'm creating half of the dragonfly, of course, because when I put the slices together, I will have a whole body. Here is the body of my little dragonfly. And I made it thin because, of course, when I put it together, it's going to be twice this thickness, like so. Here's this little head. I'm going to put that right there where the head is. Now, if something is too large, all you're going to do is take and reduce, just reduce it down, make it fit. Now let's take this little leaf, put it down here in the corner, and I'm going to curve the tip over a bit. Then I'm going to take this and it's, it'll fit. And today I'm going to try to shoot everything under my camera, right? Now that might be a bit large, so I'm just going to slide it down a bit and this will be cut off. These green tips will be cut off. You know what? That's fine because when they meet, you'll just have a leaf coming down and then coming up without any interruption. Okay, let's take our little petals and they don't really fit. This is too big. So here's a situation where all of these are kind of too big. So I'll position maybe this little guy here and these two will be reduced. Actually, these two will be reduced, maybe just this one. And then I will have enough clay to put maybe two here and then I'll use this little guy up here. Okay, so anyway, I think you get the idea that, well, just maybe it'll work for you. For me, this kind of system works really well because I, some people draw their designs out. I would rather just use the actual pieces and use them as my design elements and arrange them. Now I will try to reproduce these. Now here's one that I did before, just practicing. Now the reason why all of these fit is that this triangle is larger than the other one. This is three inches, an equilateral triangle, three inches on each side. This is more, is closer, probably closer to three and a half to four inches. And I'm going to follow this design so I don't have to reduce anything. Now I'm going to be setting these elements in black. So I kind of have, I have a decision to make here. I am going to outline them. I am. It's not essential probably, but if I don't outline them, then these details will not really stand out. And I will lose these details where the dark green meets the black, right? The dark green to the black. There's no contrast there. You're not going to see it. The leaf is going to come up and then it's going to disappear. So I'm going to wrap all of my elements with a very thin sheet of this lavender. And, and then we'll start packing the cane. So I'll be back. Okay. It's time to pack the cane. Now, I just want to point this out to you. The body of the dragonfly is not a complete wrap. I'm leaving one side bare because when the cane is put together, this side will meet the opposite. And we don't really want this lavender line between them. So this one piece in our cane is only half wrapped, not a full wrap. All right. So now we're going to pack the cane. And so I've rolled a cylinder of black clay. I use wedges quite a bit. I'm going to take one wedge and cut it in half. And now I'm going to try to reproduce this shape. I would like this black clay to cover the whole side of the petal. I'm just going to coax the leaf around that black clay. And that's pretty good. Like so. Now I will continue by adding the petal next. All right. And I'm going to draw out the base of the petal and make it very pointy so it's easier to attach it to the adjacent petal. Like so. I think I'll move it up just a tad. All right. Now I will fill this space with another wedge. Okay. So I've packed these areas. And the finished cane will have no black here. These pieces will meet tightly. Okay. I'm just going to bend this back. So I'm trying my best to follow my pattern, but of course it's not going to be exactly the same. Okay. So I'm going to continue and I will stop at another place when I think it's time to do another demo. Okay. I'm continuing my packing largely all of these, of course, with these large wedges. Now it's important as you work that you make sure that the wedge is a continuous piece that covers the whole side. If I take something and I pack it in there, well, it's not going to meet perfectly so that when it's reduced, there is going to be air here. This line will be jagged. It won't be totally smooth. So I'm going to show you that you will take the piece and draw out the clay and it may be thin. That's not a problem, but it is important that whatever volume of clay you have, it covers the whole side of, in this case, the pedal. Okay. This way, the outline that you've added, that lavender outline will be a continuous line and not broken or jagged. Okay. So I've covered the whole side of the pedal, covered the whole side of that leaf. Okay. So I will continue. Okay. So you can see that I packed part of the dragonfly and I packed the flowers, but you can also see that if I put them together like so, the angle is far too wide. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually alter this shape and make it a much sharper angle here. And I hope I'll be able to add the dragonfly and get closer to an equilateral triangle. Okay. So I did manage to improve the angle, but now it's a right angle triangle closer to a right angle triangle, which is not what I want. So I'm going to try to make it even steeper like so. And let's see. So now I am getting closer to an equilateral triangle, which is what I want. Okay. So I'm going to finish packing the dragonfly and then I'll be back. Okay. So here you see the elements as I've packed them. I did not use this one cane as it turned out, and I did add another petal here to fill up this space a bit. Now I'm going to take my blade and I'm going to trim away in an attempt to make it a bit easier to actually turn it into an equilateral triangle. My hope is that I don't have day five of kaleidoscope canes. I would really like this to be the one. I am hopeful, but there are no guarantees. Okay. So no doubt there's going to a fair amount of distortion, but hopefully the resulting cane will be pretty. I am crossing my equilateral triangle shape. All right. I'll be back. Okay. I reduced the cane quite a bit, and, you know, it occurs to me maybe I should talk about how I did that when I was quite large. I did a lot of this kind of thing where I'm pushing against two sides, then rotating, pushing, rotating, pushing, this kind of thing, and it starts to get it moving. Now I also do this. Place it down and then use my palms and push two sides to my work surface like so. And this is helping to get everything moving inside. Then I take and I actually stretch the three corners, and it's pretty nice and soft in there, so I'll just keep working on it and gripping the end and pulling, stretching. Sometimes I actually push in and pull out like that, just trying to get everything moving. And it's doing pretty well. Now parts of the cane, some of the clay is harder than others. I did cut the end just to show you. So we can see that the dragonfly is moving. These outer leaves are moving, but one of the petals, this large petal here, here, it's kind of hanging back. And what that means is there will be more of that flower in the finished reduced cane. Now if we look at the dragonfly, the actual body is moving pretty quickly, so there should be a little less of this body in the finished cane. Whatever doesn't move, more of it stays in the cane. It becomes a more prominent detail in the finished cane. Okay, so I'm going to continue. Okay, so I've reduced the cane. And you know, once it gets kind of soft or once it gets very soft inside, what you do is primarily stretch it. Okay, and as long as the cane is good and soft in the middle, it won't tear, it will stretch. All right, this is the amount of waste I had when I cut off the ends to what I consider pretty good cane. But the way I'm going to use it, I'm going to cut in the middle. Let's see what we've got. I like that. Dragonfly with my flower, flowers. And I will be cutting from the middle to the end, because really the best cane should be in the middle, right? I have a lot of cane here. So, and even though my dragonfly looks a little like a blue palm tree, I like it. Okay, so and there's our kaleidoscope. Now, if you're going to make something like a medallion like this, if any parts are thicker than others, what you want to do is take your blade and trim the excess off. And this will definitely help. A little piece of rubber matting grabs the tile and keeps it from sliding around. All right, so that seems pretty large, so I'm going to reduce the canes further, and that way I'll be making smaller pieces like this. Now, I think as I look at the ones that I made, I think I have too many of these petals in this particular design. And it would have been better had I left this one out right here, but I wanted to fill the space. And if I do this again, I'll fill the space with something else, a different color. Okay, so that's it. And whatever, it might not be perfect, but I certainly like it better than the canes, the kaleidoscopes I was making where I was just slapping things together because they were kind of boring. So anyway, I hope you've enjoyed our time together and that you have fun making kaleidoscopes. So until we meet again, bye!