Reducing a Polymer Clay Cane From Start To Finish
Video #348: Featuring my Easter Lily design which reduces right down to a quarter inch in diameter.
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IN THIS POST: — reducing canes — easter lily canes — cane reduction — reduce canes — reducing round polymer clay canes — polymer clay canes — canework — millefiori — (Topics marked with an asterisk* are discussed in the Comments Section below).
Topics Covered In This Video:
- Basic description of what a polymer cane really is, and what it is used for.
- Examples of reduced canes and millefiori beads that were made using my unique Easter Lily Cane Design
- Common challenges reducing canes and what to do to solve those problems.
- Important factors to consider when reducing canes.
– Hardness/Firmness of the different colors in the cane.
– Temperature differences in sections of the cane.
– Size of the cane… why bigger is not always better… but too small can be a problem too. - Showing the cane reduction process in fast motion so it does not take forever to watch, but you still get to see the entire process from beginning to end.
- Tips on how to reduce canes with the most success and the least amount of waste.
- Ideas for what to do with any waste cane you may end up with.
- Saving sections of the reduced cane at a variety of sizes to give yourself the most options for using the cane.
Are there other cane reducing issues that I didn’t cover in the video, which you still need some help with? Or, does anyone have any other helpful tips to share?
I look forward to hearing from you.
00:00:03 –> 00:00:07 Hi guys, its Cindy Lietz, your Polymer Clay Tutor, and today I’m going to show you how
00:00:08 –> 00:00:11 to reduce Polymer Clay Canes.
00:00:11 –> 00:00:17 Now we’re doing… we’re filming this in the over the shoulder tutorial style so that you
00:00:17 –> 00:00:22 can get the best view of how my hands are doing the work.
00:00:22 –> 00:00:29 If you’re not familiar with Polymer Clay canes, what they are is a way of building Polymer
00:00:29 –> 00:00:37 Clay up into a picture, where it’s a 3D picture, it’s a whole log of clay, where the color
00:00:37 –> 00:00:39 goes all the way through.
00:00:39 –> 00:00:44 And when you reduce the cane, which I’ll show you how to do today, you can reduce it down
00:00:44 –> 00:00:50 to a variety of sizes and the picture stays the same, like this design is the same all
00:00:50 –> 00:00:51 the way through.
00:00:51 –> 00:00:58 Then you can just take a slice off of it and use it to make beads, and often they’re called
00:00:58 –> 00:01:01 mille fiore beads when they’ve got the little tiny flowers on them, and I’ve got them
00:01:01 –> 00:01:06 in a variety of different sizes on this necklace here.
00:01:06 –> 00:01:11 Now the neat thing about it, is that you can go from a larger pattern like this all the
00:01:11 –> 00:01:20 way down to a teeny tiny little guy and still see the whole picture there, and that really
00:01:20 –> 00:01:25 depends on the style and the pattern that you’ve chosen whether it will go down to that
00:01:25 –> 00:01:33 size successfully or not, but anyways, this pattern does, this is my Easter Lily Cane
00:01:33 –> 00:01:37 Design, and I’m going to be reducing this down to a smaller size, and I wanted to show
00:01:37 –> 00:01:38 you how that works.
00:01:38 –> 00:01:43 Now, quickly I just want to, there’s… people have challenges with reducing their
00:01:43 –> 00:01:46 canes because of a few different things.
00:01:46 –> 00:01:52 First of all, one challenge is the hardness of the clay, now if I’m using a bunch of different
00:01:52 –> 00:02:00 colors in this cane, it’s very, very, very, very important that you have all of your clays
00:02:00 –> 00:02:04 at the same hardness or firmness.
00:02:04 –> 00:02:09 So for example, if I was to use a White clay here that was really soft and squishy, and
00:02:09 –> 00:02:17 the Black clay was really firm, when I go to reduce it, the White clay is happy to move
00:02:17 –> 00:02:22 around and stretch, but the Black clay if it was too firm, wouldn’t and it would kinda
00:02:22 –> 00:02:28 be stiff and wouldn’t relax and stretch, and you would get all sorts of distortion.
00:02:28 –> 00:02:35 Now, it’s not a huge issue on a design like this usually, but if you’re doing a design
00:02:35 –> 00:02:40 like a face for example, you may end up with some very bulgy eyes and a chin that just
00:02:40 –> 00:02:46 drops away into nowhere, so it’s very important that your clay move at the same rate, and
00:02:46 –> 00:02:50 that’s because of the firmness, so just make sure that you’re…if its…you have, you’re
00:02:50 –> 00:02:54 working with the same firmness all the way across for all of your colors.
00:02:54 –> 00:03:00 Another issue that comes up is temperature, now if your clay is really warm… if some
00:03:00 –> 00:03:04 of your clay is really warm, like say the outside is really warm because you’ve just
00:03:04 –> 00:03:09 added that clay, but the inside…maybe earlier in the day you made the center part of the
00:03:09 –> 00:03:15 cane, went for lunch and came back and put the outside on, the inside would be all firm
00:03:15 –> 00:03:20 and cool, the outside would be all warm, and so the outside clay would wanna move faster
00:03:20 –> 00:03:25 than the inside clay, and you would get distortion again, same kind of problem as the firmness
00:03:25 –> 00:03:26 and hardness.
00:03:26 –> 00:03:31 The way to solve that problem is to either… if you’ve made the cane all at one time, and
00:03:31 –> 00:03:35 you know pretty much that the inside is just as soft as the outside, then go ahead and
00:03:35 –> 00:03:37 reduce it.
00:03:37 –> 00:03:41 If it’s taking you a while to make the cane then… and you know that there’s a temperature
00:03:41 –> 00:03:45 difference kinda between the 2, then let it sit overnight, and that’s what I’ve done in
00:03:45 –> 00:03:50 this case, I did this cane yesterday so now it’s all pretty much the same temperature
00:03:50 –> 00:03:55 all the way through, and it should move relatively evenly.
00:03:55 –> 00:04:02 The last thing that causes problems is size, now, you may have seen some people make these
00:04:02 –> 00:04:05 enormous dinner plate size canes.
00:04:05 –> 00:04:07 The issue with that…
00:04:07 –> 00:04:11 I mean it’s wonderful if you’re a professional bead maker, and you need miles and miles of
00:04:11 –> 00:04:19 cane, as you can see, it will go down to lots of sizes, a pro might need miles of that design,
00:04:19 –> 00:04:25 a beginner, intermediate or somebody who just likes to use lots of different patterns, they’re
00:04:25 –> 00:04:29 not gonna want to commit to the amount of clay that would go into that project.
00:04:29 –> 00:04:35 Plus, they’re not gonna wanna commit to the amount of cane they’ll be left with, so working
00:04:35 –> 00:04:39 with a smaller cane is much, much better, and you’ll notice all of my tutorials, I work
00:04:39 –> 00:04:41 on smaller canes.
00:04:41 –> 00:04:47 This is probably one of the largest that I’ll work with, and this is about 2 and a bit inches
00:04:47 –> 00:04:55 wide and about an inch and a quarter or so deep, you can’t go too much smaller than that
00:04:55 –> 00:04:57 though, don’t go super thin.
00:04:57 –> 00:05:05 If you imagine, here’s a slice from… a very thick slice, but a slice from my Peacock Cane,
00:05:05 –> 00:05:09 if I try to reduce this, I’m gonna run into a lot of issues where the edges are folding
00:05:09 –> 00:05:14 up and stuff, so too thin and too small is gonna run into problems as well, so this is
00:05:14 –> 00:05:20 a very nice size, you wanna think cylinder rather than pancake.
00:05:20 –> 00:05:26 So what I’m gonna do is I’m going to start reducing this, and it takes a fair amount
00:05:26 –> 00:05:31 of time, it could take, you know 15, 20 minutes for me to reduce this.
00:05:31 –> 00:05:34 Now obviously you’re not gonna wanna sit there and watch me do that the whole time but you
00:05:34 –> 00:05:38 will wanna see the full process, so what we’re gonna do is have Doug run the camera while
00:05:38 –> 00:05:44 I’m doing it, and then he’ll speed it up so that you can watch it in fast motion.
00:05:44 –> 00:05:51 Now before I get started, there’s a few key things, I’m going to be working in small amounts,
00:05:51 –> 00:05:56 little pinches, even pressure from all sides, it will make it reduce easier.
00:05:56 –> 00:06:02 I’m going to be flipping it over from time to time, checking to make sure that I don’t
00:06:02 –> 00:06:07 have sides all puffing up, or the inside isn’t all squishing in or whatever.
00:06:07 –> 00:06:11 You may see me tap my fingers around trying to make sure that this back stays as flat
00:06:11 –> 00:06:14 as possible, and same with both sides.
00:06:14 –> 00:06:21 You’ll see me moving it around, taking small motions, so watch my hands when I do that,
00:06:21 –> 00:07:57 and I will get started with that.
00:07:57 –> 00:08:51 Okay, so I’ve stopped here to show you that once you’ve got it down to a pretty good size,
00:08:51 –> 00:08:58 I like to save a chunk of it and use it at the different sizes, if you just reduce it
00:08:58 –> 00:09:05 all down then you don’t have any options, so what I’ve done is I’ve stopped now, I’m
00:09:05 –> 00:09:11 gonna take a cut into it, and cut it maybe about in half or take a third of it or something
00:09:11 –> 00:09:13 anyways.
00:09:13 –> 00:09:18 Now the end itself, it’s always difficult to get the very end of it super tight, you
00:09:18 –> 00:09:25 get kind of some, some…like a bell-shape here with it kind of sinking in, but not bad,
00:09:25 –> 00:09:31 and as you can see here’s…I’ve just cut it open, and this is what I’ve got so far,
00:09:31 –> 00:09:34 this is it at its larger size.
00:09:34 –> 00:09:38 Then what I’m going to do is continue reducing this half here, so I’ll just save this big
00:09:38 –> 00:10:31 one and keep going until I can get it smaller, and then cut off some more pieces.
00:10:31 –> 00:11:02 Okay, so as you can see I can get miles and miles and miles of these really cute little
00:11:02 –> 00:11:09 Easter Lily Canes, in lots of different sizes just from that one starting cane that I made.
00:11:09 –> 00:11:15 And you can come down… here I’ll show you how tiny I got it down to, and see the pattern’s
00:11:15 –> 00:11:22 still pretty good, I can get it… probably pull quite a bit more off of this clump here,
00:11:22 –> 00:11:25 and then of course I would always use this scrap for the center of the beads and that
00:11:25 –> 00:11:26 kind of thing.
00:11:26 –> 00:11:32 So I hope that that was helpful for you, that you learned some new tips and tricks, and
00:11:32 –> 00:11:37 that you’ll have more success next time you reduce your Polymer Clay canes.
00:11:37 –> 00:11:40 So I will see you next time, and bye for now.
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Resource Links:
- Related Video: Easter Lily Cane Design
- Related Article: Cane Reducing Issues
- Related Article: How to Reduce Canes So They Don’t Get Twisted
- Related Video: Reducing Square Polymer Clay Canes Mini Tutorial
- Related Video: Polymer Clay Cane Tools Supplied by Tiny Pandora
- Related Video: How To Slice Round Polymer Canes Without Distortion
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This is the most helpful tutorial I have found about reducing a cane! Thank you so much!
I needed this as I am still trying to make canes and have them come out the same all the way thru the cane. Thanks Cindy
Thank you your wealth of experience.
Thank you Cindy! Your videos are awesome! I can’t wait to make a Easter Lily cane this weekend ! ought to be interesting being that I am very new to clay making:)
I just have to say: i made my first cane today! Im hooked – its so much fun! Yey!
Good for you Marthe H! I am so excited for you. I know the excitement of getting your first cane made and it’s so awesome. I wish you luck in making many, many, more!
Hi Cindy, I’ve a request for a tutorial :)
I’d like to learn how to make sun catchers, the kind that would stick to a window.
I’ve tried and was not happy with the way it turned out – granted that was years back ;/
One thing I used with liquid clay was the curling strands of cured clay that you get when drilling out bead holes (separated by color or cane colors in old med bottles) I still have a few of them (of course – do we the poly people ever throw anything away lol)
so if you’d add this to “The List” that would be awesome :D
Hi Tantsherry,
That’s a good idea, we all need a little “sunshine” in our lives. To see Cindy’s slant on “how to” make a sun catcher would be just great.
No, I do not think poly peeps throw out anything. I chop up my drilled “worms” and use them as sprinkles on miniature cup cakes, ice cream cones etc for my dolls house foods. I also use the waxy paper from cereals for different things and cut up the cartons, they are flat packed and again, have loads of uses. Trouble is i now need more SPACE to store all my IWKTFMPCP. translated as I WILL KEEP THAT FOR MY POLYMER CLAY PLAY………. cheers xx…………………
Will add that suggestion to the list Sherry!
thank you cindy
Excellent tutorial…making canes definately requires a lot of patience! :)
I have one question regarding canes and would love to hear from anyone who has and input on this.
Q: In the past I have purchased some canes on Etsy. I have been using them to cover pens, however some of the canes have been very ‘dry’ and when I go to roll them onto the pen they crack. They are either very old canes I was duped into purchasing or maybe it is the brand of clay they used. I am not certain. Anyhow, is there a way to revive these dry canes so they won’t do this? Hope this question makes sense.
Thanks for any input anyone has on this issue.
Laura
Hi Laura,
Good question. I have never used purchased canes, can you tell me if these canes are pre-baked or are they RAW clay as you would have to handle them differently.
For baked clay I expect I would seal them in a little plastic bag and put them in a cup of very hot water for about five minutes to soften them up, I would probably warm up the pen or whatever you are covering.
For raw clay I would just pop them in the oven at the normal baking temperature and semi bake them, probably for about ten minutes then wait till they cool enough to handle and again, warm up the item you want to cover. If the canes still crack I would find something flat to cover instead of curved surfaces
Perhaps to frame a small mirror.. To do this, roll out new clay on med to thick setting, depending on the size of your item( as a background color to contrast or compliment your cane).
. Use a piece of card stock to draw round the mirror and decide how wide you want the frame to be, then measure and cut out the middle piece. Lay this template on the clay and carefully cut it out and remove middle section. Use a ruler and set square and draw the inner line with a sharpie pen on to the front surface of the mirror as your guide. You can now put a thin coat of PVA glue between these lines and wait till it goes tacky Carefully lay mirror face down onto the clay and using pallet knife or other tool smooth the clay over the sides so it “grabs” the item. Cut thin slices of the pre-baked clay and imbed into the raw clay frame in a pleasing design (after turning it the right side up) Roll or smooth them in so they sit either flush or slightly indented into the surface. Then bake for one hour at usual temperature. Wait till cool to take out of oven and bake between two tiles with cardstock or baking parchment either dide of mirror. If you have smoothed the clay over the sides it should “hold”
I thought Cindy’s new Easter lily cane would look lovely with perhaps a white or daffodil yellow from her latest color palette, as a frame for a mirror so am looking forward to making this cane and decorating the mirror with the different size cane slices. Hope my written directions will help but nothing beats a CINDY tute so perhaps she would consider such as, covering pens, journal covers, mirror frames as an alternative to making jewelry items, I not sure my written instructions come up to scratch so would appreciate any comments. I used to teach partially sighted people and would TALK them through what I was doing but that was a long time ago before PC so hope I haven’t lost it!!! As would like to do workshops in the future using words in place of pictures. What do you think……………..cheers xx……………………
Thank you Elaine…I had not even thought of these things you brought up….thank you for your input and advice…much appreciated. The canes are unbaked and they are beutiful so I will most definately want to “save” them…thank you again, I will post my findings ;)
Hi Laura, you may have some old canes alright. You will need to revive them if you want to use them without then breaking apart. Hopefully they are semi cured, which can actually happen if they were shipped when the weather was hot. You can try warming them up by placing them in a plastic bag and setting them in warm/hot water. There are people who will put them in the microwave for 10 seconds but I haven’t tried that and you could run into problems if you did it wrong. You can also try wrapping them in a layer of Fimo MixQuick or spreading the outside with sculpey softener to reintroduce some plasticizers into the clay. I will be doing some testing on this and doing a video in the future. (Have a few canes that have been sitting around for a couple years that have gotten pretty stiff and old. Until then, hopefully that will help a bit.
Thank you Cindy! i think they are old but I will do some expierementing and see what happens… :)
Oh Cindy how right you are,
Isn’t polymer clay amazing. You can smash it bash it. stroke it and poke it. Pull it twist it squeeze it and stretch it but most of all you have to handle it to enjoy it. So explore it. Make loads of ugly canes, use hideous combinations of colors. Have fun, My first pirate cane was sooooo ugly it scared me! The second one was even more ugly it leered back at me with gap tooth grin and wonky eyes. I had to chop it into bits but the combination of browns black and white made some really striking beads. There is actually NO .WASTE. I have looked at some of Cindy’s ways to use up less than perfect canes. If you have got her complete library you will see, so many ways to use ugly canes and there are more that she hasn’t shown us yet. If all else fails and you have a warm sticky mess, hurl it up to see if it will stick on the ceiling and get your friends to place bets on how long before it fall on your head. Love this stuff……………….cheers xx
Cindy, just a wonderful tute. I learned so much! Cannot wait to try it. Thank you.
Thank you!! I always wondered how to do this. REALLY, you showed it very well. I think the multi-size idea is great and wouldn’t have thought of it myself. Super videos! ~Lezro-F
Cindy -you have” magic hands”! I have never been a caner The fast motion really shows how to “work” a cane. You have inspired me to try again. Thank You!!! This an amazing tute. It is way out of my comfort zone………..
Thank you . Very good video
This is magical, Cindy. I haven’t been working with my clay for some time but when I get back to it making a cane will be a lot easier and perhaps successful. I’ll keep trying and watching this tute over and over until I get it right! Something to look forward to. Thanks for being so generous with your talent.
Thank you Cindy!
Thanks, Cindy! As a newbie I’ve been afraid to attempt the “canes” thus far, but your video has inspired me to give it a try. I am amazed at the creativity of some of the canes I’ve seen, and have wondered how in the world one goes about figuring out how to assemble the pictire they want in cane form. I would like to see a video that covers that thought process sometime. Thanks again, your creativity is inspiring.
Thanks Cindy for the very informative video on reducing. This is one of my difficult tasks and I don’t know why except for maybe not having enough patience? Some of them turn out fairly acceptable and others I just want to throw away.
I have not seen a cane reduced where you leave such a flared end before. Since the ends have a lot of distortion what can you possibly do with them other than making round beads? Is it possibly to reduce a cane clear to the end so you would only have one or two small slices to deal with and if so how is that done? Sorry for so many questions but you have given me more incentive now to try and master this technique. I love the flower cane but don’t remember it in any of your tutorials. Is there one?
Well Dixie-Ann, like I mentioned in the video, you can keep reducing those ends down and keep ‘pulling’ more sections of cane off of them. You can do that by pressing in those edges of the flared ends(much better than I did), if you put the time in. With the heat of the lights, the outside edges were moving faster than the insides were, so I would have had to let it rest some more and be more patient, if I wanted to get even more out from those ends.
With the right consistency of clay, the right temperature, size and practice, you can have less distortion at the ends and therefor less waste. With perfect conditions, you could theoretically get little to no waste at all. I have found that the cane will move the best and fastest, when the whole thing was built quickly from the start and reduced right away. When all the clay is warm, including the center, there is little distortion at all.
But don’t forget, that clay is clay and it really makes no difference whether you use a fresh piece of clay, a chunk of scrap or a cane end in the center of your beads. It cost you the same. So unless you NEED to have every last slice of a particular design, it doesn’t really matter that much if you create waste in your canes or not. I never really care that much if there is some distortion at the ends of my canes. I rarely get around to using up all the canes I make anyways, so some loss is just fine by me.
The one thing I think is important for everyone to know is, worrying about doing things perfectly, tends to hold people back. If you worry about getting every last slice out of the cane, then you won’t make one until you have done every last bit of research on cane making. And as you are probably starting to see with all the information flying around out there, you will NEVER be done collecting everything there is to know on the subject. So the only REAL way to improve your skills is to make stuff… and not worry about being perfect.
You all can watch and absorb every video I ever put out there, but until you get the clay out and start making mistakes… no actual skills will be developed. It is just book knowledge. So if you find that cane work is something that intimidates you, but you still would really like to know how to do it… then just start.
Make some ugly canes. Make tons of ugly canes! If they turn out terrible then ball them up, blend the colors together until you have new color, and make a new cane with that, until your canes start looking like you want them to.
That is one of the reasons why I make small canes in my tutorials. If you mess up, then you won’t have used that much clay. If it does work out, then you aren’t stuck with too much cane in the same pattern. If you love it you can make it in tons of colors. Its all good.
I hope you understand what I am trying to get across. Reading back the way I worded this, sounds a little blunt. But if you could see my face and hear my tone, you would see that I mean all of this in the most loving and supportive way possible. I want you to get the help that you really desire. You will find most of your questions will quickly be answered when you start making and reducing some canes. :)
Oh… and btw, the Easter Lily Cane Tutorial is coming up for the Month of March.
I did this free cane reducing video for everyone so that I wouldn’t keep having to use up time in the actual tutorials for a technique that gets used over and over again. I will be doing more of these types of ‘basics’ videos over the next while, so I can focus on giving you guys ‘the good stuff’!
Thank you Cindy, in other words “practice makes perfect” LOL, I know what you mean but I guess exasperation takes over sometime and I get a little inpatient with my results especially when I see yours turn out so beautifully and I can’t make mine do the same. Thanks for the words of encouragement, I am resolved now to work harder at these canes.
and I am so excited for the gorgeous cane we will be making in March! (((hugs)))
Thank you for a great review of reducing, Cindy. I’d like to offer another tip: I use the flat top of my vibratory tumbler to “vibrate” my canes for about 5-10 minutes (depending on size) before I start to reduce. Any vibrating surface would work, I suppose, a clothes dryer, if not too hot! This seems to get all the molecules moving throughout the cane and makes it reduce more evenly. Hope you all will try it out! Love your little Easter Lily, Cindy… you know I adore canes, and you’ve made me appreciate flowers LOL.
Monique that is a unique idea about the vibratory tumbler. I may have to try that since I have one sitting in my workshop not being used. Thanks so much for the tip. If you have any more using vibratory tumblers please pass them on.
What a cool idea Monique – I’ll try it for sure :)
I hope Cindy have to do video so I can imagine Thanks to share your experience
Very clear , very well done. Thank you|
Fabulous tutorial!
Love getting a close up view of your Easter Lilly Cane and can hardly wait to learn how to make it.
I’ll use it to cover this years Easter egg for my nephew Jason – one each year since he was born :D
ps – your colors are perfect