I’ve been fighting with kaleidoscope canes again. As an apology to my clay muse, here’s a cheat sheet for laying out k’scope canes. It’s basic but it shows an aspect of clay that I love:

Clay squishes.

This is something my math brain forgets when I am sitting and designing. Triangle canes can be difficult to work with – you can use a square edge, like a box, to keep the right angle triangles crisp as you go but sheesh, what about those weird ones for hexagons? No worries, clay squishes.

So we can use a right-angle triangle to make our kaleidoscope cane and then carefully round the edges of the square. Or we can tip our right-angle triangle into the 60° triangle and use that to make a hexagon and carefully round THAT more simply into a circle cane.

Or, we can take our square cane, perhaps the result of the square cane above, tip it a little and use that shape to create our hexagon-circle shape.

I guess I simply needed a little reminding.