In the last few months I have done an awful lot of polymer clay classes for the small folk and when I explain canes I make spiral or jellryoll canes. They’re normally delighted and I have a box full of jellyroll canes in all sorts of colours on my bench now.
That said, I almost always have chunks of the basic canes in my go-to canes box. Mine are usually black and white or white and translucent but you can do these in all of the fun and funky colours that come to mind.
The bullseye cane is the basis for a lot of other more complicated designs. I tend to use them to make the eyes on my butterfly wings with this black and white combo or using black and slightly tinted translucent to build dragonfly wings.
Other basic canes would be stripes and checkerboards or repeat shape patterns like those. Using pasta machines or extruders makes those sort of canes really simple. Next post, I’ll show how to make simple picture canes.