January 14, 2010
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And now for something completely different...
You'll be forgiven if you don't recognize this for what it is...
This is the better part of 3 days of work - conditioning clay, mixing colors, building a cane that was, frankly, garbage, because I didn't define the sections by wrapping them with a contrastic color - I thought the disjointedness of the white sections would be enough - hah!
I mushed that all together and got this pretty shade of purple, and started all over again - and I think I like it. It's based on an image in a napkin, being used at a wedding reception. Amy's sister is getting married next month and I offered to make the wedding cake top. The butterfly will be the main event, but it will be sitting on a bed of flowers - and this is all you're going to see until the wedding. (Lori, don't panic, you'll see it all along the way.)
I haven't "reduced" the cane yet - meaning as of now, the wings are so large that this butterfly, if put together with a body and another set of wings, would have a wing span of about 7.5 inches. A bit large. The next step is to begin squeezing the cane as evenly as possible, into a smaller size - actually, several smaller sizes - which will lengthen the cane as it reduces. I'll cut off sections as they reach the sizes I like, and continue reducing. There is a lot of butterfly here! I see earrings and pendants and all sorts of things in the future from this one cane. But for now, to reduce!!
me<><
Comments (6)
I'm impressed. Perhaps you could sell your cane? I don't know how anyone does such exacting work! So easy (and expensive!) to mess up!
@craigellachie -
Thank you, E - coming from you, that means a lot.
I've thought about selling, and depending on how much the reduced cane produces, I may list it on Etsy. Many caners do - there are clay artists who are extremely good at caning but who really don't care to do much else, or seem to have no real talent for using those canes. So they sell them by the dozens. I have quite a stash of them, but of course, when a project like this comes along, there's never anything on hand that's useful.
Hugs!
me<><
Very nice!
I wouldn't mind seeing a picture of the cane you called 'garbage' just to see the difference in why it was ineffective for your purposes. I don't know anything about the rules of claying.
@craigellachie -
The garbage cane is now the purple of this cane. It was a darker, more deeply hued purple, and since I didn't wrap each section with black clay, there were no black lines between each segment of the butterfly's wings, or each scale, as it were. So it was just an oddly shaped thing with a zigzaggy row of white and some pink and yellow spots. Just odd. I have a cane that I messed up, though. I'll get some photos of that and post to show just what this implies. Same sort of thing happened, because I didn't choose a contrasting color.
Beautimous!!!