Pushing Variation

Before we leave the realm of canes, I thought I’d toss out a little reminder and challenge (along with adding another colorful image to our week … guess I’m feeling the need for color!) to really push what you do with canes. Or if you don’t cane, consider ways you can manipulate and vary the applications you commonly use.

Carol Simmons, a master with both canes and colors, shows the many, many opportunities for beautiful and complex designs you can find in just one cane with this image of 36 kaleidoscope versions. It is absolutely amazing to see the variation. It takes a while to find where and how she switched up and cut up the canes slices to come up with these. A couple are still a mystery to me, I must admit, but it is such a delight to find each one. It’s like 36 little puzzles. It is more than just a puzzle though. Going through and finding the patterns and determining how she arranged them can do a lot for your understanding of the possibilities of manipulating pattern which you can, in turn, turn around and apply to canes, mokume, textural patterns and anything else with a sheeted surface.

The post on this was actually from about 3 years ago but it’s a timeless lesson. Jump over to Carol’s blog post to read the whole thing and get further insight on this.

Inspirational Challenge of the Day: You know what this challenge will be … create variation with a cane or other surface designed sheet. How can you cut, rearrange, or manipulate the pattern to come up with other designs?

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