After a recent order of flower canes has turned out well I’ll open the offer up – anyone who would like to request specific varieties and colours of canes is welcome to do so. My preference is for canes along the same themes I do since the chance is better we’ll both be satisfied.
A recent request was for a red lupine and two colours of aster:
Over in Cat’s store I have two sets up this week – one a selection of yellow and white flowers with a piece of my dragonfly cane and the other a set of my juicy citrus canes.
Not surprisingly I made beads from my new corn cockle cane. Today I wired up some of the flip flop style ones into a bracelet.
There go my horizons again, expanding. A friend of mine, Danish clayer Eva Eriksen, has whipped up a veritable treasure trove of necklaces using a spool knitter, some lovely yarns and fibers and her stunning polymer clay beads and custom end caps.
The end result is a whole stack of lovelies that you can take a good look at on her blog. My favourite is probably this blue green KNN107(enlarged pic). Just my colours!
Beads are one side of my obsession. So now that I know how many beads I can get, how about how much cane?
Assuming you make round canes in the starting range of 2″ diameter by 2″ long, before reduction, that’s a bit over 4oz or 2 packs of clay + a bit. 
A square cane the same diameter and length is closer to 5 1/2 oz or 3 packs of clay.
Reduction makes waste. The more you reduce, the more waste you make. And that makes sense because that tiny little error on the big cane is going to get spread over a huge amount of distance as you reduce. So try to get your cane as neat before reducing as you can. The less distortion to start, the less there will be at the end.
A 2″ diameter cane reduced to 1/2″ diameter is 1/16th the size it was. That’s a big change. So if the reduction is perfect and there is no waste, our original 2″ by 2″ cane will be 16 times as long. Our original 2″ long cane will make around 32 inches of cane that is a 1/2″ diameter.
