Canes out of the kiln, through the saw and .... voila!

Today I have been able to pop together one of my more recent ideas for murrini - begun yesterday with the one component cane used for making a snowflake.

When I was trying out ideas for the kaleidoscope murrini cane, I thought about the way the rectangles go together and form the round murrini and got to thinking about using the components differently to make a six sided snowflake murrini..... Snowflake murrini is something I have been wanting to do for a while, but just couldn't really think of how I was going to approach it. I wanted to get decent results that could look neat, crisp, complex and with that gorgeous symmetrical repeating pattern. I looked at some of the snowflake murrini around and other than the wonderful tonbodama style ones the japanese beadmakers use, couldn't really see what I wanted oreven work out how to do it..... along comes the rectangular repeating pattern.... hallelujah!

First off I decided roughly how I would make the component cane for this by planning it a little bit like kids when they fold the paper into six and then cut it with scissors to unfold a lovely snowflake. Here is the way I approached it:

First off I did a bit of a plan on paper

Then after making a rectangular cane very like this, I pulled it out as evenly as possible, annealed it then measuring the "good cane" divided that into six even bits and prewarmed them in the kiln. Once they had warmed up nicely I assembled them into groups of three which each made a half circle, then popped those two halves together to form the complete circle without the angst of trying to insert the last cane! I did have a really bad mishap with the last component cane...... probably because I was opening the door so much, it must have cooled off - because it cracked like a bugger and a little piece of the white section cracked off, so I had to fix it on the run a little which made the cane rather imperfect, but better than no cane at all!

Once assembled, even with the last minute disaster of the cracking cane, I popper her in the kiln and she came out this arvo..... Yay! I do think it looks rather snow-flake-ish (please ignore that big slice of rose cane to the side). they do come out quite delicate like a real snowflake (not that we see them here in Sydney..... ever). Excuse the quick photo in my hand outside as it was getting dark. Polished up I think these snowflakes would be mega-lovely... especially in a fusing project ;-)