My Very First Sig Cane

And it looks like it, too.

This purple button gets to stay in my personal collection because the evil thing cracked as I was making it, and though I think I did a good job healing the crack, one can never be sure: the purple button I featured a week or so ago just did this to me, even though I have no memory of it cracking during construction. If you look closely along the top edge of this piece, you can see the slight discontinuities where the piece cracked. Having one's large expensive button suddenly lose a crescent-shaped piece, leaving sharp edges and a good deal of customer fury and dismay in its wake, is not an experience I really wish to pursue.

I slit a piece of that black craft foam, et voila, button lies flat. 37mm button, soda lime glass 2006.

But as this is my very first work to incorporate my own sig cane, that's not all bad. I'd rather like having these little milestones on hand, and now I have the perfect excuse to keep this one, warts bubbles and scum and all...

The back. Not only did the button crack, so did the shank bead. It healed up, but the bead release didn't.

The iconography of the sig cane comes from two sources---one, my `code' for glassact group sales is `star', that is, my first initial and the first three letters of my last name. S.Tarn makes a little more sense for a real sig, so I just added the `N' to the star, which I made with my star mashers. Thus, I reduced from 4 (TARN) to 2 (*N) the characters I needed, and got to use a tool that I desparately need to practice with. Oh yes, I'm all about killing (or at least capturing) multiple birds with minimal stones.

So far as the 2006 part is concerned, should anyone care, 500 years from now, who made this extremely minor item in a very large art-glass movement, I figure they'll have no problem eliminating 1906 simply because people weren't signing their stuff by then and by 2106 the technology will be so far beyond what we have now that the would be historian will have no difficulties placing this in the correct century. And, have I mentioned I'm lazy? Frankly, getting the canes to not twist as I lay'em down is a problem, so I fewer I have to cope with, the better I like it. No Loren Stump, me.

file created 20mar06