The Cost of Mixing Glazes From Scratch

(All prices in this article are in Canadian dollars and were valid in Oct 2021)

For those of you who already mix your own glazes, did you know that you can input the costs of your raw materials into Glazy.org and it will calculate the cost of each of your glaze recipes?

Just login at Glazy.org > Click your name at the top > My Home > Materials Inventory

Enter the price you paid for each material. Then you can go to any of your glaze recipes and fill in the “batch size” and “units for price estimate” fields and it will tell you the cost of that glaze.

Here’s an example of Sue’s Clear – for a batch size of 1000g, the material cost is $3.92. A 10,000g batch would cost $39.20.

These are actual costs in Canadian $ from my local supplier in Oct 2021. Yours might be very different

If I cut that in half, 500g of dry glaze plus water will generally make more than a pint of liquid glaze. I’ll err on the generous side for the purposes of this comparison and say that 500g dry = 1 pint liquid glaze.

So for this particular clear glaze, my material cost is roughly $1.96/pint.

Out of interest, I did a search on Glazy for cone 6 clear glazes to compare. The costs depend on the materials they are made with. High frit glazes cost more than glazes made with mainly raw materials. My clear glaze fell in the middle with most clear glazes costing between $1.50-$2.50 for a 500g batch size.

For another comparison, let’s look at the cost of a glaze containing an expensive colourant like cobalt. This is one of our studio recipes, Sapphire Blue.

Here, I entered 500g as my batch size and the cost is $4.92. Notice that almost 50% of the cost of this glaze comes from the added colourants. A good thing to keep in mind!

So, we’ve got a pint or 500g of glaze mixed from scratch averaging between $2-$5.

The cost of commercial glazes

Let’s compare with some cone 6 commercial glaze prices.

In order to compare apples to apples, I’ll use the prices from the same local pottery supply shop where I got my raw material prices (in Oct 2021). These are in Canadian dollars. Your prices may be very different.

Bottled glazes sold by the pint

Amaco Potter’s Choice glazes = $22-$25/pint

Amaco Celadon glazes = $22/pint

Spectrum Hi Fire glazes = $13-$28/pint depending on colourants

Spectrum Shino glazes = $20/pint

Spectrum Celadon glazes = $13/pint

Moroccan Sand glazes = $23/pint

Most of the glazes are over $20/pint but we’ll go with an average price of $20/pint for commercial bottled glazes.

Dry powdered glazes – just add water

Plainsman G2926B Clear glaze – $8.30/500g

Plainsman G2934 Matte glaze – $9.35/500g

These are base glazes that you can add your own colourants to so our comparison would be with the cost of a base glaze without colourants – $1.50-$2.50

Other considerations

So in a very general conclusion, the cost of buying commercially prepared glazes is roughly 4-10 times more than the material costs for mixing your glazes from scratch. Even though prices inevitably increase over time, the relative difference between the options remains. And the cost of using commercial glazes can really add up if you’re glazing lots of pots.

Of course, you need to account for the time it takes to mix glazes. The larger your glaze batch sizes are, the cheaper your labour costs will be.

You also need to account for the up front expenses of purchasing buckets and sieves for glaze mixing and you need space to store all your glaze materials.

With all that taken into consideration, it’s still much more cost effective to mix your own glazes from scratch, in the long run.

A long time ago, I did a full cost analysis including labour for the public pottery studio where I work and it made way more fiscal sense for us to continue paying technicians to mix glazes from scratch than to switch to buying buckets of commercial glaze.

Not to mention the freedom that comes from mixing your own glazes and the ability to control, alter and troubleshoot them.

When you find a glaze recipe you like, you can do a colour run to discover new colours of compatible glazes, using the same base glaze.

When glaze problems arise, knowing the recipe of your glaze makes it way easier to troubleshoot and solve the problem. When people ask me for help with their glazes, I can almost always figure out the problem when they give me the recipe. If we don’t know the recipe, it can take more tests and firings to solve the problem.

I hope that this blog post has been informative for you if you’ve been considering learning to mix your own glazes from scratch or considering switching to commercial glazes. Both have benefits and drawbacks and the right choice for you really depends on your individual situation.

Learn to Mix Glazes from Scratch

If you’ve never mixed a glaze from scratch before and want to learn, I teach an online workshop called Glaze Mixing Essentials where I show you all the steps to mix a glaze and then test a base glaze with multiple colourants. Click the link for all the details.

Ceramic Story-Time with Sue

Watch the Video

In this video, I read the blog post live in my Facebook group and answer questions.

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If you love learning about and discussing glazes, I'd like to invite you to my free social learning Facebook group called Understanding Glazes with Sue. The group is full of videos and discussions about firing, mixing glazes and fixing various glaze issues. Please join!

Free Guide to Repeatable Glaze Results