Reducing Waste By Adding On

This week I decided to add on to the project I worked on last week. Every week I have created a new form of a clay cane but I have never simply just added on to a cane that I have already made to create a totally different look. I got this idea from http://www.polymerclaycentral.com/cyclopedia/simpleflowercane_mia.html website where it showed me the steps to how to add on to my flower cane I made last week. The real reason why I wanted to do this project was to prevent wasting my materials. I found that when making these canes I use a great amount of clay, and then when I have made a few beads out of the canes, I still have this long cane left over. All of the different canes I have made just sit there waiting for me to make something out of them. So in order to reduce waste I decided I was going to use the example on the website and just add on to my flower cane to create a totally different and new look.




I found these extra steps to be very easy, but they made the cane look so much better. The first step I did was use my extruder tool and extrude a long square yellow cane and then a long square blue cane and cut them into 7 equal pieces and put them in alternating order of blue and then yellow and placed them around the cane and rolled it out so they were sticking to the cane. After that was done I had one more step, which was to flatten a purple piece of clay on the thickest setting of the pasta machine and wrap it around the cane. I did that and rolled the piece around the cane and took my first slice into the cane and it looked great!!! I was so excited about this design because it looked so complicated but it really wasn’t because I was just adding on to a design I had made previously.



This whole process of just adding on to my previous project reminds me of the AIDS awareness quilt we spoke about in class. Although I am one person making this project I am putting it together in pieces, just like the AIDS quilt was put together by many different people to create one quilt. I think it would be cool to have different people add on to my cane to have a finished project because then it wouldn’t just be my own work but it would be the work of many other people.



For future projects I hope to try and teach a friend how to make a clay cane and to hopefully have them add on to one of the canes I have made, and start creating a group project with many different people.

This is the cane that I started with from last week.

Here is the cane with the alternating yellow and blue stripes.

This is the final cane with all the added on elements!

These are come of the beads that I made with this cane.