I cut out stencils from thick tablecloth vinyl & use iron oxide to stamp. I use a tub with folded jersey cloth for a pad to keep the amounts of oxide just right for a stamping foam brush the pad allows the oxide to fill the stamping tool but not too much. I stamp on top of a glazes as control of the oxide is essential, too little & the stamp fires faded too much & it is dark & messy. I periodically add water with a small squirt bottle for moisture.
joy
Magnolia Mud posted a question very recently, actually quite a few questions, but this one seemed to be one not asked yet: Where do you go to obtain more information (and/or background) on ceramic related topics, ideas, suggestions, insights, or questions you pick up from colleagues, general reading, online forums, in casual discussion, or your own pondering?
This strikes at the heart of why I am involved as a moderator and a contributor on the forum here. For years, there was no internet. . . yeah I'm that old. Local libraries put their budget into things that would get the biggest audience. . . usually fiction. Magazine subscriptions were available, but in specialty mags you know that they can be expensive. Books were the biggest source of my information in the 70's to the late 80's. I searched local bookstores, went to Penn State for the textbooks used in the art department at the student bookstore, checked with professors about what books to read, and get and then ordered them in. Over the years, I developed a pretty nice library of which you have seen many in the Potters Quiz of the Week. Then came the internet, and the world changed. It was a safe place in the early years, kind of elitist to be on it, and yet so much specialty information existed and forums popped up with discussions on all sorts of things several devoted to Ceramics. They came and went, and evolved. Some became fractured by argumentation, others died from lack of interest of lack of participation. Happy to say that our has not gone and seems relatively healthy.
For me though, obtaining more information often calls for specialization, as in glazes chemistry, or firing techniques or some other area. Often this leads me to a thinking period (gestation) where the material is sifted and rethought to come to my own conclusions. Forms are usually that way, techniques with texture and decoration in the bare clay, and on the glazed surface. Much of it is a reformulation of old stuff, and new stuff, and Preston stuff.