I'm just getting into carving - I don't know if I'll ever be a real carver, but I've found gouges started using a few gouges to to work on shaped things where I might have used rasps in the past, and found them invaluable. I just have a couple of gouges, but am looking at picking up a couple incannel gouges, and eventually getting a a v tool and a few more gouges and working my way through some of the things in Peter Follansbees DVD, which I've just started watching.
I'm fairly good at free hand sharpening, get the concepts, and feel comfortable moving forward sharpening things, but feel like I could use some more tool-specific equipment for keeping profiled tools in shape. I've been using wet dry and micro finishing papers in combination with strops to sharpen profiled tools where my flat waterstones aren't going to cut it. I'm not particularly fond of using papers for sharpening, but I can make it work.
There seems to be a lot of options for different slips and such, and I'm looking for recommendations as to where to stop. It seemed like oil-stone slips would be a good place to start, but even that leaves a lot of choices. I'd prefer not to spend a whole lot (obviously) but also don't want to get something just because it's cheap and find myself with something in the bottom of a drawer that I never use because I bought something better after dealing with a poor solution - if that was going to be the case, I'd just continue with paper.
Any suggestions as to where to start? It'd also be nice to be able to use the same gear to be able to sharpen basic molding plane profiles, but that's less of an issue right now - if the best solution for carving type tools isn't also the best solution for molding planes, the gouges would come first.
I'd prefer starting with a few things and then adding to it over a large initial cost outlay, but maybe that's not the best way to go?