"Beads and Buttons"

Click image for closer view

	I got the idea for this cane from Judy Ankerman's article in Polymer Cafe magazine. She shows an example of a log of stacked circles of different colors which you press through a clay gun with the square shape hole. It creates a cane of varigated patterns. Instead of baking and slicing the warm canes into tiles, I stacked the square canes into a 3x3 checkerboard cane and reduced, then layed out a pattern on a base sheet of clay to apply to other things, such as this tile bead. It ended up with a very "retro" 50's look!
	This tile bead was made from a mokume gane block sliced with a ripple blade. What you can't see with the scan of these two tile beads is the silky smoothness and deep shine of my sanding and buffing. The look and feel reminds me of those little polished, wooden letter tiles in Scrabble games... =)
	The back of this set of tile beads is a sheet of textured black clay accented with antique silver Pearl-Ex.
	I used some of my gold mokume gane block to make a set of buttons. Each one is sanded with 3 grades of sandpaper and then buffed.

this page last updated June 10, 2003.