Hi! My name is Keith Brown and I was born (1970) and raised in the Baltimore, Maryland area and presently live in Reisterstown, MD. I enjoy camping, fishing, and the outdoors. I perhaps first became interested in designs during high school, where I would doodle them in the margins during class. This continued through college, while I obtained a B.S. degree in Chemistry. Not so many doodles in the chemistry notebooks, however. In the years after college, I still enjoyed doodling and was looking for another way to make designs that didn't involve pen and paper. I was interested in this because I wanted to be able to repeat patterns and elements of drawings without having to draw each and every part of them. I saw the candles sold during the holidays that were decorated with millefiore designs,and since some of my drawings were symmetrical, mandala-like patterns resembling the designs on the candles, I became interested in how the designs were made. I found out that they were made with wax that was built into canes. A friend suggested that I first try making the designs with polymer clay, before getting into all the technicalities of wax cane making. I'm not sure exactly when I started working with polymer clay, I think it was around 1996-98. I got a few books on the subject of polymer clay, and started making canes with Sculpey III® polymer clay. After I got the basics down, I started to use the firmer Fimo® brand clay and further refined my caning technique. I came up with the name Canespinner based upon my frustration with not being able to make canes fast enough and thinking that I could solve the problem if I was a spider (webspinner) that could spin canes. Well anyway, I was hooked to exploring the endless possibilites of polymer clay.