Building Millefiore Canes

There are all sorts of canes; simple geometric shapes or very complex ones. Canes that look like people, animals, landscapes, or even entire scenes can be made. The wide range of prints found in textiles is easy to recreate in polymer clay. These canes can be used in many ways, including as components in building very intricate canes.

Any simple cane can be cut apart and recombined to create the kind of repeats found in textiles. Square repeat canes allow for easy creation of smaller scale staggered designs and can be cut and placed on a backing to form sheets of clay "fabric" that can then be used in many ways.

Start with enough of a strongly graphic cane, and you can recombine it in many ways. Reducing the image changes things quite a bit! So does adding quartered segments from another cane at the corners, or packing with a color different from the background. Always try to cut a length to keep from each section before you change it drastically, and then you will have a selection of different scales and styles.

Leigh Ross translucent polymer clay lace canes

Lace Canes can be made using any simple or complex pattern while restricting the color choices to white, off white, and translucent.

Premo translucent with bleach, also know as Premo "Frost", darkens the least of the translucent clays, and is very effective in this kind of usage. Leigh Ross made the lace canes shown here in this image

It can also be used as background in floral canes, and when sliced very thin and applied, both lace canes and floral canes made with translucent make use of an optical illusion. The translucent quietly disappears from view, allowing a layered or dimensional floating effect. Also, when pieces made using canes with translucent clay are sanded and buffed, they have a very glassy appearance with no glaze needed.

When formed into triangle and square components, random colorful designs can be recombined to form more regular mirrored repeats.

Clay can also be placed in gradated stacks, cut and reformed for intricate geometric shaded effects.

Kaleidoscope canes are also made in this manner, by taking segments of the cane and mirroring the pieces, sometimes many times over.

Below are some canes made by Shane Smith that use these kind of repeated and mirrored segments.

Even very elaborate and detailed canes are built using some simply shaped pieces. When polymer clay is rolled out like a rope or a snake, the cut off end is round, as shown at left in the picture above. One edge can be pinched along the top to create a teardrop or petal shape. Pinching the clay into triangular or rectangular shapes is easy too. You can use a roller or brayer to flatten the sides on rectangles as well. Sheets or "tongues" of clay can be rolled out to even thickness best by using a pasta machine, which allows you to make at least many different thickness settings that are all even, but you can also use an acrylic roller or a brayer. Flat sheets are used to make stripes, checkerboards, jellyrolls (spirals), bulls-eyes (concentric circles) or to outline other shapes.

No matter what kind of canes you may want to make, it is important to use clay colors that are of similar consistency. If you try to mix very hard and very soft clays in one cane, the soft clay will reduce while the hard clay does not, or not as fast. This results in distortions. You want clays to all move together evenly while reducing.

To make a floral cane, you will usually need a center, petals, and perhaps a leaf or two. Centers can be a simple snake or bulls-eye, or a grouping of them; spirals (jellyrolls) make great centers for roses. Petals can be fat and rounded, long and thin, in single rows or layers! Make them solid color, or shaded in either horizontal or vertical ways.

Horizontal shading is achieved by stacking layers of progressively lighter or darker shades of a color in sheets or tongues, or by taking a Skinner Blend sheet and folding it accordion-style so that the dark part is on one end and the light on the other end of the resulting folded stack. Or, roll the Skinner Blend sheet up into a jelly-roll so that the dark part is either in the center or the outside as you choose.

how to make a polymer clay flower cane This cane is about three inches across and four inches tall when built.

It has 6 petals made from an accordion folded Skinner Blend created using purple, blue and white.

The center is a yellow bulls eye wrapped in orange and then in red.

Flower canes are the perfect place to relax an try new things, and to practice reduction. A little distortion does not show nearly as much on floral designs as it does on stripes and geometric shapes.

Here are the pieces used to create this floral cane:

To create the bulls-eye center, a snake of yellow is rolled out and wrapped in a thin sheet of orange, then another sheet of red.

When wrapping, roll the cane until the starting line of the clay sheet hits the clay sheet, then unroll back a little. You will see a faint line on the clay sheet--that's where you cut the sheet and then the wrap will fit perfectly with no overlap.

This is a bulls-eye cane. Reduce it until it is the diameter you want for your flower center and cut it to a three inch length.

The petals start as a Skinner Blend sheet. You can see in the image above that I've started with purple, blue and white. When folded top to bottom and put through a pasta machine around 15-20 times, folding top to bottom each time, the colors become gradated. This is folded accordion style as shown above. Then this long piece is gentle rolled to round it, and pointed at the white and purple ends to form a petal shape. This is then wrapped in a thin sheet of black clay to create an outline, and cut into 6 pieces of equal length.

The leaf also begins as a Skinner Blend, but with only a slight variation from darker to lighter green. Rolled up, it shades from dark in the center to lighter outside. Slice down the entire length and line with a thin sheet of black to form the vein. Realign the leaf parts and point the top and bottom by squeezing. The remaining green is rolled into a sheet and placed on a thin sheet of black, and then rolled up to form a slight jellyroll with the end extended. This will be a tendril in the flower cane.

how to make a polymer clay flower cane Petals are placed around the center and leaf sections are placed in between.

Two sections of tendril help fill in space as well, then white clay snakes fill in to bring the shape to a square or rounded plug shape. This "packing" is a very important step. The background of the clay cane is what keeps the image components from distorting when the cane is reduced. Make sure there are no air pockets. Remember too that the ends of canes that show are not as lovely as the protected parts inside--the ends distort quickly.

Make sure there is enough clay on the outside circumference of the circle that the picture elements are not visible from the sides. Wrap the entire thing in a sheet of clay if needed. You can make this cane square or round at this point--or cut a piece for each! Gently squeeze the cane into the shape you want. Carefully reduced, this can then be cut in sections and recombined. This gives a grid or even repeat effect.Repeats can also be staggered or combined with other cane sections. Starting with a vivid flower allows for a great deal of reduction and still the details can be seen. Always save a length of cane just as it is before you recombine in other ways. This gives you more options later.

To make staggered repeat pattern square canes from a round cane, cut two equal lengths of cane (around four inches is shown used here).

Set one section aside; this will be the center. Slice the other section down the entire length of the cane to make a half circle, then slice down the center of the half circle canes as show to create quarter sections.

Place these quarter-sections around the central can piece, with the points of the quarters facing out. Add white clay snakes to fill in the areas between the corners. Squeeze gently along the length of the new square cane. Use a brayer or roller along the flat sides to make them smooth and even.

Now you have a square cane that looks like a patch cut from fabric just as it is. Cut a piece of this and set it aside to keep.

Cut four equal lengths of this cane and stack them to 2x2 to create a smaller staggered repeat pattern as shown in the five canes below. Or, take the square cane and cut in four lengths and stack them 2x2 to create a repeat as shown at the far right of the 5 canes shown below.

This can then be further cut and stacked--at right is a cane made with two different canes, one with green dots and one with four flowers repeated evenly (made with the original cane in square form, shown at center below, then cut and stacked in four). Both square canes were cut on the diagonal down the length of the cane from corner to corner to make triangles from the square. These sections are then arranged together to make a new square. This is similar to how quilt pieces are cut and reassembled from fabric, but with more depth.

floral canes made with polymer clay combined in different ways

This chrysanthemum cane also starts with a simple bulls eye center of gold wrapped with black, Then petals of red, pink and light pink are added around it.

All petals have a thin wrap of black to outline them. The light pink outer petals are first wrapped in a sheet of white clay, then the thinner black layer. Snakes of black are pinched to a triangle shape, then used to fill in all around the flower.

Think of the design as being like a child's wooden puzzle, where each shape is a different color and all go together to form the image.

This chrysanthemum cane has then been reduced. Some sections were turned into squares and recombined as shown with the purple flower above.

Here's a necklace made with the chrysanthemum canes and a Japanese girl face cane. Scraps of clay from the cane making process were used to make the other striped, feathered, and heishi shaped beads.

necklace with Japanese Girl and chrysanthemum canes made from polymer clay