BRAIDED CANE DEMO

About a year ago I was looking through Desiree McCrory's website http://desiredcreations.com/howTo_CABraidRainbowCane.htm and I found her "How To's".  There was a braided cane in there that I thought I would try.  I'm kind of lazy though so instead of doing a 3 color Skinner blend 3 times, I did a 2 color Skinner blend 3 times and made my plugs from that.  I didn't like the colors once I got them all together.  So, I thought I would do it again but this time I covered each plug in black so I would get some division between the canes and colors.

 

 

The piece in the middle is the cane I used to make the hearts in the front.  If you click on the picture you can see the hearts better.  I also put some pearl and translucent in each of the plugs before I made the cane. Then I rolled the plugs out to about 18 inches each and started the braid.  You can make them longer which I did with the square in the middle which gave me more colors centralized together.

This past Saturday I did a demo on my take of Desiree's braided cane at our clay guild meeting.  I made the two blocks before the meeting and the 3 plugs on the left were used to demo how to do the braided part of the cane.

 

This is what it looked like after I braided it.  Then I flattened it with my acrylic roller.  Desiree runs hers through the pasta machine but I don't.

 

Once I had the braid done, I folded it back and forth like you will see in Desiree's pictures.  Then I cut it with a ripple blade.  You can run the pieces through the pasta machine once you cut them or you can cut them with a straight blade.  I also cut pieces off the block on the corners.  I usually back my pieces up with a piece of black clay before I cut my pieces out.  These make great pendants.

 

This is the piece again after I cut it with the ripple blade.  If you don't like the piece you cut, you can put it back together and turn it around and cut it again.

 

 

 

I made this shoe pendant from the cane piece above it.  You can see where the pearl in the clay really makes it pop.

 

I'll post the pictures of what I make with the three new blocks of cane as soon as I can find the top of my work table.  LOL