Flower Center Cane – tooaquarius

Making Flower Cane Centres

I make a lot of flower canes and many of them need some sort of centre. Mostly that’s a log of marbled colours – browns of various shades, some yellows, golds. Some flowers need a little more thought! I make these ahead of time and then just pull them out to use as I make the flower canes and I often use scrap clay for the centres because brown and greige are pretty common scrap colours in my studio.

You Need:
– a variety of clay pieces in the colours your flower needs. For the simplest version: browns, dark browns, golds, a little yellow
– a blade, a roller or pasta machine

The Steps

1. Roll out logs or strings of your colours. Make them a variety of thicknesses.

2. Cut your logs into pieces about the same length. I usually try to work with 2 or 3″ (50-75mm) segments. Gather them together.

3. Roll out this bigger log until it’s double or triple the original length and then cut and recombine it. Keep doing this until you like the detail of the lines.

Ideas:

Look at other flower centres and see how the parts would be simple cane components. For example, a poppy centre is a speckled part surrounded by a darker ring. You could duplicate that with a bullseye cane of blackish around a log of lighter colours made like the above steps.
The zinnia cane I made recently got a centre with a scrap of clay blend and surrounding bullseye canes

The Video Version

If you prefer a video of my flower cane centres being made… this is the place! You can see these specific cane centres in the flowers here and here for example.