How to make an Ikat Rope Cane from polymer clay

Hi everybody, welcome back to my channel. Today I want to share with you how to make this beautiful 3D rope cane. Here I combined it with a bubble wrap background and when you look closely at that rope you can see that it's not actually fully blended. Instead it has this line texture that kind of looks like one of these beautiful e-cut fabrics and that's why it's called the e-cut technique. The e-cut technique is a variation of the skinner blend so today we're going to do the blending together and also we're going to do it a little bit differently. So I installed my machine here in the frame so you can see what I'm actually doing and these are today's colors. You can choose any colors you like but they got to have this gradient. We want to go from a very dark color to a very light color in four steps. These sheets are 10 by 12 centimeters at a level zero. I made them a little bit longer and we'll start by making two blends and I will combine this darkest color with a medium light one. Just layer it on top and the lightest color with a medium dark one like that and then on both blends I'll mark this line here that's a little bit off-center. Here's the center and it's the same position in both blends and then from this line we'll go two thirds to here and to here and then we want to draw a curve from here to there and our highest point is on this line here. So it will look something like this and on this blend we'll draw the same curve but bigger. So we it will go all the way from here to that corner and the highest point is outside but again on our line something like that and now we'll cut through both sheets on that line and arrange them into two blends. As you can see for both blends I was using the light color in the middle and I placed them on a wax paper because now we want to pick up one of these blends and layer it on top of the other and this sheet will run it through the machine as if it was a blend and we'll make it a little bit straight. Straighten it again into a rectangular. You can also chop off the ends because now we want to double it like with a normal Skinner blend but with a Skinner blend you would just fold it but we don't want these two colors touching so what we'll do is we'll cut it in half and then layer it on top like that. Try to always align the sheets so we have a nice block and I will repeat that three more times. So this is our stack and I was trying to keep it nice and rectangular and also be careful to not make it too wide. You know rather stretch it a little bit because now we want to cut it into four pieces and stacking them on top of each other. And from this block I will just trim off the ends to make it clean and I will wrap it in a thin layer of the darkest color. So I was using a level six for the wrapping just to create a thin outline and now we need to reduce this piece and we want it quite long. I'll make it to 20 centimeters. So this is our reduced block. I was trimming off the ends to make it clean. We want to shape it now because this is going to be one segment of our rope and what we want to do is erase this corner, make it round and make the other one pointy and erase this corner. So we're arriving at this shape and actually here you could also make the whole thing more curved into a sort of lenticular shape and it will make your cane look more like a like a string or braid. But today I want to make that thick rope that you saw in the beginning so for that it's nice to keep these sides kind of straight and parallel. So I was shaping the cane over the entire length and now we want to cut it into five pieces. I've got a bit longer, 25, so we're gonna have five times five. Now these pieces, we'll shape them a bit more and we'll make a curve at the end to create an S shape and we'll do that with all five pieces and pay attention to not lose your orientation because you know they're not like symmetrical. And now we can put them together and the way we want to put them together is have an offset here, have these two edges parallel with a certain distance and the same distance on the back and again when you're putting it together, see now I lost my orientation, it's, you know, watch your ends because one end is, the brown is a little bit shorter and this is longer so we want them all in the same orientation. And we're gonna do one last thing and this is a trick I learned from Sarah Shrivers who is a master of tessellated canes and this is gonna be a tessellated cane which means you can tile the slices together seamlessly and to achieve this we'll make a cut somewhere in the middle and the cut is perpendicular to this side so it's here and you know the position doesn't matter but you know we don't want to chop off these little corners here so I'll make it here and first I'll mark the sides to to get a clean and straight cut and then I'll cut slowly and then we'll flip those pieces and put them together like before with a same offset here and here and now this side will join seamlessly to this side on each slice. Now this came before reducing it we'll need to fill these gaps here which is a bit unfortunate because actually you want to keep this curvy outlines so what I'll do is I'll fill these gaps and then after reducing from each slice I will cut away the excess material to get back to this curvy outline and to fill the gap I will cut from a thick sheet of our dark color I will cut at a very very flat angle to get these very flat triangles here that will fit inside these gaps and here's our finished cane. I added a layer of that background color of the dark color on both sides just to make it clean and now it can be reduced as much as you like and actually I would love to see your version of this cane so if you have some nice photos please send them to me also please leave a comment don't forget to subscribe to my channel and thanks for watching