Magpie Creative has followed me, Maggi, around for well over 12 years. It morphed, way back when, from Magpie Creations - primarily a hand-dyed fiber and fabric store into an overall umbrella for my passions.

These passions have been many and varied, but, over the last 12 years, 2 have stuck around and made a nice cozy home inside my brain - fused glass work and metal work.

Seemingly different at first blush, it was my love of glass that started this whole crazy mess. My fascination with glass began like all my obsessions, I happened across a book (this time it was "Contemporary Warm Glass" by Brad Walker). The pages held photos of amazing shapes and colors - how could this be? Glass is cold, breakable and brittle. Not so, with the addition of heat - this once formidable material could bend and melt and become something entirely different.

I was hooked. I found a kiln on Craig's List and took a class in fusing - and I was off. My interest in materials once thought to be unchangeable and daunting (at least in my mind) led me down the path of metal work. It, like the glass, is hard and unforgiving until you pair it with heat. By simply changing the molecular structures in these materials (both glass and metal) they can be as easy to work with as oil paint on a brush.

Living in Midcoast Maine makes it hard to have my items widely distributed - this, and the want to create small, limited - and in many cases, one-of-a-kind pieces is what brought me to Etsy. Offering free shipping on all my items (sans my sun catchers) has allowed those abroad to order from my small, home studio - it's amazing, to me, to imagine my work, the pieces that have been lovingly made from my own hands... all across the globe.