Playing with the extruder - square sticks

I have been playing a lot with  polymer clay recently, trying out new things.
I thought I would share some of them with you, here's the first...

Square sticks

I didn't quite take the right pictures so you will have to piece it together a bit yourself.

I put some sticks of polymer clay in the extruder barrel instead of the usual discs to see what would happen. As you can see I was just playing around and not taking my time to be neat. I would cut them into neater square cross section sticks of even size in future. On the right are 2 bits of the extrusion you get with a triangle pattern.

Here is a shot I took for my reference. I used square sticks in the barrel and the square extruder die and I got out the square diamond patterns. Here you can see what they looked like put together. There are 16 of the extrusions in that pattern piece. I put 4 together to make a larger square and reduce it, then cut and restacked into the slice shown.



I guess if you rotated the square extruder die in relation to the square sticks you would get a quarters pattern.

(just playing about with the e-pen I am trying out hence the sketch - I drew it on paper with the e-pen which also captures it as a jpeg)



You could of course just cut square or triangular  pieces of polymer clay and put them together to make this but it might just start you of on an experimentation with the extruder of your own.