I wanted to share some insights into caning with all of you.  The past few days have been an exploration in my history with polymer clay.  From the moment I started working with polymer clay, I was interested in EVERYTHING having to do with it.  There isn’t enough time to explore every aspect of it in a short amount of time, but I truly tried to do so. 

Along with all of my other early experiments, I made a few canes.  I quickly realized though, that this was not something that was going to be easy to learn.  I was fortunate to find a brand new group starting on Facebook to address exactly this problem.  The group, “52 Weekly Cane Projects” began, and I was eager to join it and start my journey.  I, along with many others, followed Rian Schreuder-Sanderse every week as she pulled us along in our exploration of canes.  She was tireless, patient, helpful, and encouraging.  As a result, we were all completely mesmerized by the process and jumped in to try the cane/s for that week. 

Fast forward about 6 months and my health started to deteriorate.  I could no longer keep up with the group and soon was having trouble doing ANY claying at all.  It’s been a year and a half since then, and finally I am starting to see a little light at the end of the tunnel.  I will never again be as healthy as I was before. I discovered some new health conditions that will never go away, and these conditions increase the problems from other health conditions I already had.  I am finally at a point where all of my conditions are as good as they are going to get.  I am on the proper medications, I have learned what to do to control them as best I can, and now comes the part of just living with them.  I am finally going back to what I love doing and have been spending more time in my studio. 

Now, having said that, there is a ramping up that is required to get back to claying as much as I was before.  The muscles are out of shape, the concentration isn’t as good, and then there is the backlog of projects that must be gotten through before I can get to work on anything new.  Working on projects that have been sitting around for a long time means that I have to get back into that head space.  I have to try to remember what I was doing, why, and where I was going with it.  It’s tiring, so I need a break now and then.  But I don’t really want to start on a completely new project other then something very short and quick.  Last thing I need is to have another half-finished project taking up space. 

So, as a break, and to clean up my studio a bit, I have been going back to my canes.  All of my canes are kept in either plastic see through shoe boxes, well wrapped in cling wrap, or in bead boxes for the smaller canes.  I started to organize my canes, this includes the cane ends and bits and pieces of old canes that only have a couple of slices left. 

The first thing I did was separate all the canes ends and bits and pieces into one box.  Then all of the left over bits from creating canes, like plane wrapped colors, or bullseye canes, spiral canes, etc., went into another box labeled “elements”.  Then I sorted all of the canes. 

While doing this I received a revelation.  Although I had a cane from every week of the group for the first six months, only SOME of them were usable.  I discovered that first, some of the colors had bled into the surrounding cane, (I have since learned that I should wrap some of the pearl colors in a solid color so they don’t bleed past that point).  Second, some of the canes were so boring that I couldn’t think of anything to use them for, (usually this was because of my choice in color combinations).  Last of all, some of them were so distorted or uneven, that they would have to be fixed to see if they had any usable cane left, (sadly, some were a complete loss). 

I made a new box labeled, “scrap canes or re-blend”.  And that’s what I have been doing.  Going through and making scrap canes when I can, or, if the colors are too boring, re-blending them into a new color.  In only a few cases the re-blended colors ended up being mud.  Most of them were actually usable colors and can be reused later in other projects or canes. 

Usually I am very anal about my colors.  I carefully blend them, making a recipe as I go along so that I can recreate it if I want.  This is of course impossible in the case of scrap colors.  Usually I use those scrap colors in small projects or small canes.  If the new color is too small of an amount, I save it and re-blend it again into something else that might need a bit of oomph to liven up the color and save it from mud. 

I am finding though, that in some cases, just fixing the cane, smoothing it, making sure it’s a uniform size, getting rid of messed up ends, the cane is salvageable. I am learning though, that I made a lot of mistakes in my early cane experiments, and even in the early weeks of the group.  The one consistent problem I am running into is that I was impatient and that was my biggest difficulty with caning. 

So, now that I am more experienced and better at making canes, and I am more patient with the process, I can see exactly where I went wrong. I am also finding that I can tell where my impatience overcame me in the process of the cane, what I did wrong, and how to fix it in the future.  It’s amazing to see that it’s really clear where the problems were created, as if I am looking at a map. 

I thought I might share some of these insights, and see if maybe I can prevent someone else having to redo a bunch of work down the line. 

1.  I can’t stress this enough, patience is your best tool with caning.  If you aren’t patient, every bit of work you do will be wasted, or at least you will end up with a much smaller amount of usable cane then you wanted.
2. When you are using the slab, or tube, or whatever beginning shape your clay starts in, make sure it is uniform.  If you start with something uneven, it will just get worse over time.  Take the time to make it as uniform as possible, even if that means it takes you a long time to make each element.  It’s annoying, but if you start from messy, your end result will be even messier.  So, take the time to clean up the edges, cut off the bad part, even though you don’t want to waste that beautiful color, or the effort that went into the really complex process.  Believe me, letting go of that few mm of clay will save you a lot of hassle in the long run.  Those bits and pieces can be re-blended, put into a scrap cane, or used to make some little do dad of its own.  DON’T make the mistake of thinking that you are saving that little piece by including it in the cane.  For all intents and purposes you are actually handicapping yourself and making it very difficult to get a good cane later. 
3. Put together the elements, then…STOP!  Don’t try to do anything with it yet.  Put it down, walk away.  You are making your job VERY hard if you try to do anything with it in this state.  The elements that you worked so hard on, are now warm, squishy, and easily distorted.  If you think you can be careful, think again.  Every color of clay, even of the same brand, can have a different texture or property to it.  Once you take basic clay and add anything, the result is randomized.  Each item they use to change the color of the clay, has its own weight and texture.  The result is that every color can reduce at a different rate.  The ONLY way to counteract this is to start at the same temperature and manipulate it slowly.  So again, put it down, don’t touch it, and walk away. 
4. Now, having said that, how long do you leave it alone depends on what you did to it, how many elements, how hot your hands are, how hot your house is, and how rapidly the temperature on the cane changes.  My standard is, overnight.  If it’s warm in my house, then overnight in the fridge.  That gives the cane time to settle down, get to an equal temperature throughout, and gives you time to get back your patience.  Remember that?  Patience is what you don’t have after working on the cane for however long.  What you have is eagerness.  You want to see the result of all your hard work.  You are excited at the possibilities, and you want to see if you screwed up at some point.  It’s SO hard to have patience at this point, but again, it’s your most important tool. 
5. Ok, so your cane has rested overnight.  Time to work on it…except…STOP.  Look at the cane.  The ends are all messed up, there might not be pattern all the way to the end, or it’s distorted somehow.  This is where your patience pays off.  Because the cane is completely rested, cutting the end off straight is easy.  I can’t tell you how many times, (eager to see my result), that I cut the end of the cane off, or cut into the center, just to see what it looked like.  It was warm still, so the end is all squashed up, no longer in the shape it is supposed to be in.  The outer later has sort of overlapped on the end, because as I passed the blade through the cane, it dragged the warm edges over the area and is now covering part of the cane.  So, now, since it’s rested, it comes off cleanly and I can see the pattern, or I can’t, which means cut off more.  Sometimes it’s at this point I find out that I screwed up somewhere and there is no usable cane because no matter how far in I cut the cane, there is no pattern that isn’t screwed up.  At this point I just add it to the scrap pile to be repurposed, (usually as a scrap cane).  The reason you don’t want to use the cane without cutting off the messy ends is…messy end = messed up cane.  So make sure you are starting from a clean cut that is even. 
6. Now, you probably want a smaller cane.  Very few projects start off with the cane in the exact size you created it.  It’s time to reduce. Hold on though…before you start reducing, you might want to cut off a part of that cane at that size.  You can’t make a cane bigger, so on the assumption that you will be using this cane in many projects, you will probably need it in different sizes.  Plus, storing canes is easier at a bigger size.  So, cut off part of the cane, wrap it up and put it away.  You want to do this at every stage of reducing the cane so you have graduated sizes.  
7. Ok…you put away part of the cane and now…finally, it’s time to reduce the cane.  Reducing is the most difficult part of caning, and requires…you guessed it…PATIENCE!  The biggest mistake I have made with reducing is trying to do it all at once.  If the cane was warm to begin with because I had just gotten done making it, I would have been better off not to make it at all.  But let’s assume I was able to put off reducing it the first time till after it had rested.  Now I have a cane that I want to reduce to another size.  It may be just a little bit smaller, or I may want to reduce it to a 20^th of its size.  Either way, I have to do it slowly.  Starting from the middle, I push a little bit all the way around to start the process.  If you are expecting it to push in very far, you will notice right away that the cane is hardly moving at all.  This is good. This means it’s exactly the right temp to start working on.  You want to gradually go down the line of the cane pushing exactly how hard you did in the middle, till you get to the end, and then repeat the process on the other side. 
8. At this point look at the end of the canes.  If the middle is starting to cave in, there are two possible reasons.  Either it’s warm in one part of it, or the clay consistency is different at the center then the outer edges. 
9. If the clay is a different consistency there isn’t much you can do about it.  You just have to go very slow and resign yourself to losing a part of your cane at the end.  Sometimes, no matter what you do, this is going to happen.  Again, with different things used to create the colors, you are going to find that different colors in the same brand can still be of different denseness.  This means they will reduce at a different rate, and you get caving inwards. 
10. If, however, that isn’t the problem, it leads back to the temperature.  If you didn’t let it rest enough, put it down, walk away.  If you DID let it rest enough, it might be that you have warm hands, your place is warm, or a combination of these.  What happens is that the outer part of the cane is warming up faster than the inner part of the cane.  This can happen very quickly after working on the cane.  Sometimes you can’t reduce more than one size before you have to let it rest again.  But if you try to rush it, you will get messed up ends, caving, and unusable cane.  The solution is, put it down, walk away, let it cool off and rest.  I have taken days to reduce a cane, because I had worked so hard on it and I didn’t want to lose half the cane to impatience.  The time for this to happen, varies based on your home’s ambient temperature, (again, if it’s warm, put it in the fridge). 
11. After you have finally reduced your cane to the size you want, put it down, walk away.  If you try to cut it right after reduction, you are going to get that drag from your blade and the outer edge will drag across the pattern.  Let it rest again and THEN cut it. 
12. Congratulations, you have finished a cane.  It might have taken you days to do one simple cane.  You will get better at judging where and when you need to stop and rest it.  Practice and experience, and of course patience, will help with this.  All I can tell you is that you get faster as you get more experienced, but at a certain point, there isn’t any faster you can go. 

Caning is very rewarding, as long as you do the right things and jump through all of the hoops.  I can tell you though, when I wasn’t following the patience rule, it was frustrating and wasteful.  I ended up having so much that didn’t work that I had BOXES of scrap that I needed to repurpose.  Now that I know though, I have so much more fun caning then I used to.  I find it much easier to follow the patience rule when I am either working on multiple canes at the same time, or working on another project at the same time.  It helps to distract me from the mistake of doing things too soon.  I hope these insights have helped you in some way, I wanted to give back to a community that has been one of the most supportive and kind group of people I have ever met.  I can’t thank you all enough for your encouragement and compassion.  With any luck, I will get to give back some more as I go on.  Thanks everyone for your time in reading my lengthy post.  J