Another thing I did at Clay ConneCTion was to make myself a bunch of new stamps to use with my pottery. You can make pottery stamp from ceramic clay but polymer is so much easier! Since polymer does not shrink, you know how big to make the design. Plus you can cure the polymer much more quickly than you can fire ceramic stamps. And they don’t break when you drop them on the floor. And you can use scrap clay! All you need to do is roll sheets of clay on the thickest pasta machine setting and then cut and stack the sheets to make a rectangle about one-inch square and two inches long. You can make designs by carving the soft clay, adding coils and shapes, or impressing textures into the clay. If your clay is pretty firm, as mine was, you can put a design on each end and use the sides for more designs. After you bake the clay, you can make more stamps with the design in reverse. I recommend that you condition the clay well and bake the stamps for an hour.
There’s another polymer stamp making tutorial on the Ceramics Network site. And there are plenty of design ideas around the Internet. Check out Hair of the Rabbit And don’t forget Pinterest.
Porcelain beads ready for the kiln. I can’t wait to see how they come out.
Ornamento 