Glaze Combinations

Where to find glaze combos you will love

Every glaze on our shelves looks great on its own. Layering two of them is where the jaw-dropping stuff happens, and knowing which two play well together is an education all its own.

Good news. You do not have to figure it out alone. These are the places we send members to see real combos, on real pots, from real potters who already fired them. All free, all worth joining today.

A shelf of small labeled test pots at The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah, each one fired with a different glaze combination for members to look at before they glaze
Our own test pots, by the glaze shelves. Same idea, smaller scroll.

The big four

Four groups, a quarter million potters

Each one is built around a single glaze brand, which is what makes them so useful. Find the brand on the jar in your hand, then go to the group that lives and breathes it.

110K+ members

AMACO Cone 5-6 Glaze Forum

The biggest of them by a mile, and the one to join first. Everything Amaco: Potter’s Choice, Celadons, Shinos, Satin Mattes and the Fluxes, layered every way people can think of.

Go to the group

100K+ members

Mayco Mud Room Society

Everything Mayco. Stroke & Coat, the Stoneware line, Elements and Jungle Gems. People here are unusually good about posting their coat counts under the photo, which makes it one of the easiest groups to actually learn from.

Go to the group

32K+ members

Spectrum High Firing Glazes

Dedicated to Spectrum’s mid-fire lines and the layering tricks people have found with them. Worth a scroll before you reach for a Spectrum jar rather than after.

Go to the group

11K+ members

Coyote Glaze Ceramics & Pottery

The smallest of the four and the friendliest. Coyote is a newer line and an amazing one, and this is where people work out how the Gloss, Satin, Shino and Constellation colors behave stacked on each other.

Go to the group

One tip that makes these groups ten times more useful

Do not scroll and hope. Search. Every one of these groups has a search bar inside it, and it is the whole point.

  1. 1Type the exact glaze name off the jar in your hand. “Ancient Jasper” gets you hundreds of fired examples. “Nice brown glaze” gets you nothing.
  2. 2Read the caption for the four things that matter: both glazes, which one went on first, how many coats of each, and what clay body it was on.
  3. 3If the caption skips them, just ask in the comments. Potters love being asked this. You will almost always get an answer.
  4. 4Screenshot it. You will not remember it in two weeks, and two weeks is exactly how long it takes to find out whether it worked.

Not just Facebook

Four more worth bookmarking

GlazeShare

Free and community built, and actually searchable by combination, glaze and clay body. The closest thing that exists to a real database of commercial glaze combos.

Pinterest, searched right

Nearly everybody names these photos the same way. Search “Blue Midnight over Oatmeal cone 6” and you get real results. Search “pretty blue glaze” and you get a mood board.

The brands themselves

Amaco and Mayco both publish tested layering galleries with the coat counts printed right under the photos. Free, and more reliable than a stranger’s phone camera.

Test tile videos

There are potters who fire whole panels of numbered tiles and read them out one at a time on camera. An hour of that beats a month of guessing.

And the one nobody thinks of. Walk our test pots and ask the person at the wheel next to you what they used. Fired here, on our clay, in our kilns. Nobody in this studio has ever been annoyed by that question.

Save them. Join them. Scroll often.

Whether you are layering celadons, mixing fluxes or playing with texture, these groups will open your mind to what is possible. Then bring it back here, put it on a test pot, and find out.