Poly Pipe Cane Tutorial

I saw a truck, the other day, carrying a massive load of poly pipe all stacked up on the back. It inspired me to get creative with my extruder. Here's a tutorial for my new Poly Pipe cane, instructions are in the captions! I've tried this with a few colour combos (as shown in the pictures at the end) and it's really effective.

I used Kato polyclay in black and white. You can use any colours as long as you get a nice contrast.
You will need an extruder with a few different diameter circle discs, a pasta machine, a ruler, a blade and a good clean work surface, I used a tile.

Condition your clay and then roll it out on a medium setting on your pasta machine. Lay the clay flat on your  work surface.

Cut out circles of clay using the extruder barrel.

Lay the circles of clay on top of each other as shown above.
Pattern used in this example: 2w 1b 1w 1b 2w 2b 1w 1b 1w 1b 2w 1b 1w 2b 1w 1b.
Or alternate pattern: 2b 1w 1b 1w 2b 2w 1b 1w 1b 1w 2b 1w 1b 2w 1b 1w.

Neaten stacks and reduce slightly to ensure they can fir inside the extruder barrel.

Extrude your clay stacks into snakes using 4 different sized extruder discs. Make 2 snakes at the 3 larger sizes and 1 snake at the smallest size.

Cut all snakes into 8cm segments.

Stack the clay segments randomly, forming a cane. Fill gaps with the smaller diameter segments.

Voila! Your Poly Pipe cane :)

Poly Pipe cane pendant

A different version of the Poly Pipe cane

Poly Pipe cane used for flower petals

Poly Pipe cane pendant