The Raven Cane: The Conclusion

Reducing the raven cane was a nightmare. Once I began applying pressure, the stupid thing wouldn't budge. After much careful pushing and slapping however, it began to move.

As with any cane, as I watched the end become distorted and immediately got nervous. After the massive amount time and materials I invested into this project, I was dying inside to see if the image would be distorted.

Finally, once it was reduced to a reasonable size, I sliced into it. Success! An astounding raven image was embedded in the clay. After experimenting with the slices, I found I could make the image appear in a few different ways. I couldn't have been more satisfied with the results.

Here are the finished slices before baking, buffing and polishing:

Happy Birthday To Me!

Today is my birthday. In the past few years, this has been an event little remarked on, and one I've never made a big deal of. However, I do take this time to look back on another year, evaluate life, and all of that happy, deep stuff.

I'm very satisfied with this past year of my life as far as my crafts are concerned. I've blossomed, learned new skills, and experimented with my creativity. I've grown more in the past year, perhaps more than in any other year in recent memory.

In that vein, I also received some of the best gifts ever this year. Yesterday, my parents came up to visit, and my mom took me to the jewelry supply store and let me pick out several items that I needed and couldn't afford. In the meantime, my dad spent the day building me my very own jewelers bench. Here it is:




I know it's not beautiful, but to me, it's spectacular. The fact that my dad made it for me, and that both of parents actually acknowledge, and respect my creative endeavors, means the world to me.

Happy Birthday ME! Here's to another year packed full of creative goodness.....

The Raven Cane: Part One

Recently, with the help of some online tutorials, I've been teaching myself to make picture canes out of polymer clay. Happy with my first forays, this week I decided to attempt to make a cane strait from my own brain.

The obvious choice was to make a raven. As intimate as I am with the raven, I thought it would be no problem to piece one together fairly easily. Boy was I wrong.

After spending an entire night focused on just the bird shape, I let it rest. Last night, I began packing my image, and after using 6 packages of clay, I was out, my hands were red, and I was frustrated. The cane was already huge and not even half packed, as shown here:





Today, I took the day off of work to get a few things done. After making a trip to the craft store to pick up more clay, I sat down and spent another 2 hours completing the packing of this cane:





Though it's not completely round, I'm satisfied with it. Now, to let it rest overnight. Tomorrow will begin the reduction process. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that three days worth of work doesn't turn out to be a mess.

To be continued.....