After owning several retail shops with multiple employees for years (where I sold my own handmade jewelry and art glass), one day I looked around me and said "How did this happen?!" The joy of creation had been replaced with stress, paperwork and administrative duties... and let's not forget TAXES! Not one to quit, I trudged along for several more years while the economy's downturn quietly whittled away our savings. When we could no longer sustain the shops, we closed them. A blessing in disguise to be sure! I now work at home on our beautiful farm... we had moved to land in rural Illinois from St. Louis to escape the hectic city life and yet I never got to enjoy it!

My life is split fairly equally between my beloved glass shop on Etsy and our farm and private life. I play entrepreneur in the morning, farmgirl in the afternoon, glass artist in the early evening and back to Etsy at night. It might not be for everyone, but I LOVE IT!

Why glass? First, early in life, the magic of church stained glass windows become ever entangled with spirituality in my mind. I developed a reverence for glass and light, light and glass. To this day, I still hear a choir when I see a beautiful window in the light. I love that glass is mysterious, that it is part liquid, part solid and somehow defies the traditional rules. I love that it is only itself and seems to have a mind of its own.

There are amazing glass artists out there, masters of precision and manipulation that get glass to do things you wouldn't think possible. That's not me. I am fascinated with the organic nature of glass, how it "wants" to flow and fall, the raw edge of glass as it comes from the factory that shows how it was melted and how it formed. This is why most of my designs are fairly simple, abstract or allow you to see what the glass itself decided to do when I heated it. I realize I grant glass its own free will, bordering on consciousness... but that is my favorite thing in life... each thing being itself.

Whether it is a chicken being a chicken, me collecting Starbucks cans in the back of my car or glass falling how it "decides" to, there's nothing more honest and therefore joyful than each thing being what it is.