The Butterfly

This one was supposed to be a small cane.

I'm having a lot of fun now that I'm back into caning everyday.  It didn't take long, The TARDIS was my fun project to get started after too much time off, and now I've got more ideas than I thought possible last week when I may have let myself get a little discouraged (we don't need to talk about that right now though)

I was going through all my clay trying to find something I could make without using much blue or black clay and I came across a bag full of clay colors I had mixed for a project back in June.  I'd made one small background cane for it and it was meant to look like a sky, since I'd scrapped the original project idea I decided to see what I could do with it.  I wanted a quick cane, not a week long project like most of my canes turn out to be.

The first thought that came to me was to make a bumblebee, but I ran into two problems with this idea:

1. Too much black clay.  Something I don't have much of right now.
2. A black and yellow bug didn't seem like the right fit for the background I was trying to fill.

So my next thought was to make a butterfly, the colors I'd already mixed for my now defunct project seemed like they would make a beautiful butterfly and it's been almost 10 years since I last made one.  That one was very popular with the 3-8 year old girls (hoping to appeal to a wider audience with my current work) and there are things that I've wanted to do differently if I ever made another (I've learned more about color palattes in the years since this last fellow was created, there were too many conflicting purples for my liking in my first one).  One thing I did really like about it was the way I made the backgound,

One of the more time consuming things about the way I cane is mixing all the different colors.  But that was already done for me so the work was quick and I came up with this in only one toddler naptime (and still managed time to make dinner):

You can see the piece of background cane that inspired me in that picture too.  By the time I was done building my butterfly I realized I'd made it too big for the little bit of background, and decided it would be fun to use in in a lot of different ways, so I packed it with playdough and scrap clay and reduced it that way.  After I cleaned it up I cut a slice of the smaller butterfly and made him some antennae and packed in the background clay.  I think I was a little tired because I forgot to take a section of the cane when it was still bigger, so I only have the small size to show you.

As you can see from the picture at the top of this post, I have a lot more butterfly to play with.  And as you can see from the picture right above I have a lot to learn about taking pictures.

I'll probably make some jewelry from the canes without the background, but I also have some pictures in my head that include the butterfly that I would love to turn into canes or wall art.  I'm trying to challenge myself to finish things with them.  The finishing is not my strongest skill, I tend to just make canes, then bake slices of those canes. I really need to up my finishing skills, because I don't know if I feel like just selling my canes.