Custom Canes
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:
On eBay
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.
Flip Flop Beads
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.
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Beads and… Knitting?!
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!
Clay Math - Part II
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.
Clay Math - Part 1
If you’re allergic to math don’t let this scare you off - it’s a good way of cutting down on your scrap when you’re planning your projects out.
When you take a package of clay to make base beads, sometimes you’d probably like to know how many beads you can expect. So technically speaking, I once measured a package of Premo. That 2oz package of clay has a volume of: 2.953 inches cubed.
So if you were really picky - and really, really precise - you could get 51 12mm (1/2 inch) beads or more than 400 6mm beads (1/4 inch).
Think that’s incredible? You could, in theory, get 1400 4mm beads. I think there is such a thing as ‘good enough’ though.
Mapping Canes
No, I’m not insane. You really can map out your canes. I have a rambly in progress sort of tutorial for it over in my Learn section using this photo of a corn cockle:
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