Polymer clay tutorial: "fire flower" cane (blue version)

Here is a complete (or at least I hope) tutorial concerning the method to realise this "fire flower" cane out of fimo clay.

Here is the orange & black version of the same cane.

I am not very good at taking pictures (I mean pictures without cat ears or tails in the corners) as you probaly already noticed but I tried to do my best to illustrate the process.

We start with two color gradients, each of one made of three different colors. I chose these ones:

I realize color gradients with my pasta machine, flattening and folding the three colors together. I’ll try to write a short tutorial on gradients as soon as possible… Anyway here are the results:

After reduction, our two gradients are identical cylinders.

We cut each of them into four identical parts. One of the parts will have to be cut in half once more. We now have five parts of the first gradient ("blue" one) and four parts of the second one ("yellow" one):

We now have to put the pieces back together (the two smallest parts go on the extremities):

Then we reduce, pressing the sides to obtain a cane this shape (this has a very strange appearance but don’t worry, that’s fine!):

We cut the cane into the number of petals we want (often 6 in my case) and give the pieces a “petal shape” by pinching their sides.Here we are :