In glassblowers, sugarcane refers to colored glass rods; These stems can be simple, contain one color, or they can be complex and contain strands of one or more colors in the pattern.
Cane work refers to the process of making sugar cane, and also to the use of pieces of sugar cane, longitudinally, in the blowing process to add complicated patterns, and often spiral lines, to boats or other objects of glass. You can browse various online sources and find more information on mirror cane.
The cane is also used to make murrinas, thin discs cut from sugar cane in cross-sections that are also added to objects that are blown or worked with heat.
A special form of murrine glassware is millefiori ("thousand flowers"), in which many murrinas with cross-sections in the shape of a flower or star are inserted into pieces of blown glass.
There are several methods to make sugar cane. In each case, the basic technique is the same: a piece of glass, which often contains various patterns of clear and colored glass, is heated in an oven (glory hole) and then stretched, using a long metal rod (tip) attached at each end.
When the glass is pulled, it maintains the pattern of a cross-sectional in a lump genuine, but the slope is quite evenly at all times (because of the skill of glass, it is interesting, aided by the fact that if the glass is it to be narrow at some point, it will be cooler there and therefore be stiff).
The stick is generally stretched to about the diameter of a pencil, depending on the size of the original lump, it can vary in length from one to fifty feet.