Making your own glazes…is time-consuming. No, I mean really time consuming and just like the rest of pottery, it’s a steep learning curve, full of lessons and failures.

So, before you embark on the mamoth project of creating your own glazes ask yourself: why you want to? Is it because you want to broaden your ceramics knowledge? To deepen your understand of your craft? Because you enjoy experimenting, discovering something new? or you love a challenge and have the luxury of time and money to take a break from production to dedicate to it? Or you want to push your work in new directions. Great, amazing, crack on! Or is it because you feel like you are not a ‘real potter’ if you don’t make your own glazes? Ooffff. I am just going to leave that there a moment…

Maybe I am alone in this but I’ve have certainly been down this comparison rabbit hole. When I first started my pottery business I always looked at all the established potters on and off social media and felt like their work is ‘better’ than mine; worth more. One of the main contributing factors of this feeling was ‘their work is better because - they make their own glazes’. Is that statement really true? I am calling BS.

It is true to say there are potters with more experience, deeper knowledge, more pots under their belt but of the potters who have been doing it a similar length of time and with similar knowledge? Some fire their work once, some fire it five time. Some ceramic artists don’t use any glaze on their work at all, some only ever use one colour - does that make them not as good as someone who uses 20 different glazes in their studio? No, in fact I’d say there is an argument to say the potter that uses only one glaze is smarter! No one way is better- just different.