GlazeMixer.com

While cruising the internet for some low-fire glaze recipes, I found a website called GlazeMixer.com. This is a great idea, or at least it seems so to ceramic artists like myself who want to mix their own glazes but don’t have the room for so many raw materials, their proper storage and needed ventilation.

The glaze-based community is the pet project of Ryan LaPine and his wife. Both are potters, and Ryan is also a software engineer. This website is a way for him to combine his computer skills with his interest in ceramic arts. LaPine and his wife live in Cardiff, California.

GlazeMixer allows you to enter and save glaze recipes upon creating a basic account. After adding a recipe to your profile, you can order the glaze in dry or liquid form:

You can save your glaze recipes online and retrieve them anywhere that you have access to the internet.

When you save a recipe, it becomes part of your personal glaze recipe list. From this list, you can select glazes that you want. Glaze Mixer will mix them for you and ship them to your door!

Glaze Mixer gives you the freedom to use hundreds of raw materials in your glaze recipes. You are no longer limited by the ingredients that you stock and you no longer have to buy expensive materials that you rarely use.

Glaze Mixer also helps you avoid the messes and dangers of mixing your own ceramic glaze recipes.

Users can also peruse the community section, a section of the website with 29 pages of public recipes. These are also available for purchase from Glaze Mixer. When you buy someone else’s glaze, they get a 10% commission.

I’m not all that fond of the design and navigation of the website. It’s clean, but it looks too much at first glance like a domain registered just to paste ads upon. Most disappointing is the simplistic search for the Community Recipes page. You can choose low, mid or high-fire, or from salt, soda, wood or ash, but you can’t search by colors or finishes. The site navigation also needs a little work.

Nonetheless, this could still become a very useful resource for me. I’d be interested to hear from any users of the the website, as to their experiences in adding recipes and ordering glaze.

* Update: I entered a few recipes and ordered a couple of those. They didn’t have frit 3289 which was in two of the recipes I wanted to enter, but there is a form to request they stock additional materials. I checked daily to see the progress of my order, although this part of the website was not updated. It is supposed to let you know when things are mixed and when they are shipped. Regardless, I received my order 8 days from when it was placed using the least expensive shipping method.

The gentleman running my local clay supply outpost, Flat Rock Clay, knew of GlazeMixer.com and agreed that it’s a great idea. However, he had concerns that it wouldn’t last, since such businesses are supposed to obtain specific licenses in order to sell what can be toxic raw materials. To his knowledge, Glaze mixer didn’t have such a license.