Are crystalline glaze pieces actually sellable, and what would you charge?

Crystalline work sits in a wierd spot pricing-wise because the market for it is small but dedicated. There are collectors who follow glaze chemistry and specific artists, and they pay more than craft fair traffic ever will. So the answer to your first question is yes, there's a market beyond fairs, it just looks diferent: juried shows, gallery consignment, and online shops aimed at collectors rather than browsers. On pricing, I did the hours thing my first year and it nearly killed the whole venture. You can't pay yourself a wage on one-off studio work, you'll always arrive at a number too low to survive. What actually worked was pricing by object class. I settled on a floor price for my smallest sellable piece, then scaled up by volume and how much glaze work went into it. Bigger forms with heavy crystal growth got bumped into a higher tier because that's what buyers responded to, not the raw material cost. A six by ten vase with good crystal formation is not in the same category as a small bud vase and shouldn't be priced like one.

The other thing that helped me stop talking myself out of numbers: look at what comparable crystalline potters actually charge, not what you think people will pay. Check artist websites and studio sale listings, write down a dozen price points for similar sizes, and put yourself somewhere honest in that range. Crystalline has built-in perceived value because of the failure rate and the fiddly firing schedules, so buyers genrally expect to pay a premium over standard glazed ware. Don't undercut that expectation, it just makes you look unsure of your own work.

As for the jump from making for fun to making for money, the part that surprised me was how much the mental shift matters more than the pricing math. Once I treated my studio sales as a business with a set margin instead of guessing per piece, the anxiety mostly went away. Also, keep that ochre one for yourself or price it high. The piece you're weirdly attached to is ussually the one that sets your ceiling, not your floor.

When I started selling my stuff the biggest hurdle wasn't pricing, it was keeping batches consistent enough that repeat buyers knew what they were getting. A cheap digital scale changed everything for me. I was eyeballing my glaze measurements before that and wondering why one batch came out different from the last. Once every bucket got weighed and logged, my results stopped wandering and I could actually promise somebody a piece would look like the photos. For crystalline work especially, where the whole point is the crystal formation, I'd want that kind of repeatability locked down before putting anything in front of collectors. Did you keep notes on your glaze batches while you were testing, or did the consistency just come from firing the same schedule over and over?

Those crystal glazes sound amazing, like the pots I've seen with the little frozen flower bursts on them. I've only ever made mugs with plain glaze from a bucket, so the whole idea of a finish that grows patterns on its own is wild to me. Do the crystals only show up on the sides or do they wrap all the way around the bottom too? Because I've seen some with a bare ring at the base and I never understood why.

Been selling my pots since the seventies, and the one thing nobody tells you is what the gallery cut does to your numbers. I put pieces on consignment at a shop back in '85 and learned real quick that if the shelf price doesn't work for both of us, you're working for free. Whatever you decide a piece is worth to you, figure the gallery will want half or better, so the math has to hold before it ever leaves the studio. The other habit from the old days that still serves me: I keep a firing log, sheet of paper next the kiln, date, load, what came out. Thirty years on I can flip back and see what actually sold, not what I hoped would sell. That log taught me more about pricing than any book ever did.

Update: took the plunge and listed a few pieces. The advice about pricing for galleries stuck with me, so I set my numbers high enough that a shop cut still leaves me something, instead of the lowball figures I kept talking myself into. First vase sold within a week, and the collector crowd point gave me the confidence to aim past craft fairs.