An over view of how I make a retro cane

Hello! Can you believe it a second blog post this month? I thought I would share an over view of how I create one of the patterns you see often in my work in a variety of colours.

The colours before I sheet them out and make them useable

Here they are all flat and ready to be used. Here you see

shades of blue, turquoise, lime greens, white and brown.

Next I use a cutter to cut all these circles.

Then those circles are stacked like this. Sometimes I will make up

a pattern other times I just grab and stack with no pattern.

Those logs of clay now go into this tool called an extruder the end

of the extruder has a square die in the end of it.

The clay comes out looking like square snakes.

I cut and stack the snakes and it looks like this from the front.

A side view of the same stack of snakes.

That stack of snakes is now called a cane and when sliced with a sharp blade looks like this. Each slice looks slightly different.

The textured sheet of clay now becomes the back of the buttons

and the lighter blue sheet is where I will apply all the slices

of cane I am about to cut.

The slices of cane are applied to the sheet of clay then rolled

and smoothed out until usable. 

The pretty sheet and textured sheet are now stuck together.

Now its time to choose the shapes I want to cut out. I  grab my cuttersand fit as many shapes onto the sheet as I can. After the shapes are cut I put holes in the buttons. Put them in the oven to cureand sand and buff as needed. After that its time for pictures, editing and listing online. I hope that gives some understanding of

all the steps I take to create a back of buttons.