I compared the various glues I had in my craft room, inspired by Mary Palanco (https://youtu.be/DaaRhzmA0H4). Her test was great, but I was more interested in price per ounce than price per container.
I tested 13 glues, all of them items I had and none bought for this purpose. The most expensive glues were glue pens or smaller bottles with fine tips, while the least expensive glues were large bottles with large tips.
I had to discard two glues that had solidified, probably from being stored unused but open for too long.
The expensive glue pens and slight less expensive fine tip bottles included:
- Lawn Fawndamentals glue tube $11/ounce
- Aleene’s Tacky Glue tube $9.40/ounce
- Tombow Mono Multi $9.53/ounce
- Nuvo Smooth Precision glue pen $8.01/ounce
- Elmer’s Precision glue tube $4.67/ounce
- Nuvo Deluxe Adhesive fine tip bottle $4.99/ounce
- Ranger Glossy Accents fine tip bottle $3.28/ounce
The less expensive, larger tip bottles included:
- Reptile Premium Craft adhesive $2.70/ounce
- Bearly Art Precision craft glue with fine metal tip $1.64/ounce
- Elmer’s Glue All extra strong $0.31/ounce
- Aleene’s Original Tacky Glue $0.31/ounce
I rejected the Reptile glue as too liquid for my purposes.
That dark ring around the glue is water. That just won’t work for me.
The budget option is to convert the large, inexpensive containers into precise delivery containers. The most common options I’ve seen are glue tubes (filled with a syringe) and one-ounce needle-nose bottles. The one-ounce needle-nose bottles are less work to fill in my opinion, so that’s what I’ve elected to use.
While my preference for normal glueing is Elmer’s or Aleene’s in a mini-bottle, there are some special uses for a couple of these glues.
- Tombow Mono Multi remains tacky when dry. This can be useful for sticking unmounted rubber stamps to a block or stamping platform, or adhering a stencil to paper.
- Ranger Glossy Accents remains shiny when dry. This can be useful for creating shiny elements on your project.
- Reptile is surprisingly effective at adhering paper to plastic. I don’t know when that will come in handy, but I have not found any other PVA glue that can do that.
The one-ounce bottles are readily available, but the ones I’m using are from Amazon (affiliate link):
Papercraft Crystal 