Lately, I’ve had a lot of comments on these two kaleidoscope designs on my Facebook page. People particularly like the colors I used. Both of these designs came from the same master cane, a cane I call “Farewell to Spring” because I made it when the spring flowers were giving way to summer ones. Today, in mid-March I might have called it “Dreaming of Spring.”
"Fruit Drops" by Elian McCready
As with the Chinese embroidery, the color inspiration for the master cane was a textile; in this case this needlepoint pillow designed by Elian McCready. The design, called “Fruit Drops,” appears in “The Ehrman Needlepoint Book,” by Hugh Ehrman. I love looking at needlepoint books for both design ideas and color inspiration. An added benefit is that the shading of objects in needlepoint designs is simplified, which makes them readily translated into polymer clay canework.
This is the master cane I created (actually, these are slices of the cane components arranged on a piece of glass to represent the cane design, which is why there are discontinuities in the design). When I translate my color inspiration into canework I often increase the range of light/dark contrast as I did here so that the design components continue to be “readable” after the cane has been reduced.
I appropriated a couple of the images in the pillow (the blue-green leaves and the cherries) for in my cane design but I switched some of the colors around. I made the cherries in my cane the color of the darkest part of the central peach on the pillow, and used the colors of the cherries on the pillow for flowers in my cane.
These are some of the kaleidoscope pendants I created from the master cane. The color balance in the kaleidoscope designs differs from pendant to pendant depending upon which area of the master cane was used in the pendants.
Nevertheless, they are color coordinated because they share the same overall pallet.
