Beech Street Glass
"God forbid you sit down for 5 minutes while your kiln fires." - L. Lillvik (my better half). Tis true. I am a bit of a workaholic, so why not add another extraordinarily time-consuming skill to my repertoire?? I actually started making stained glass flowers because I would get vases out of the kiln and want to take photos right away. I usually didn't have fresh flowers on hand and would have to go buy them, so I wanted to figure out a non-perishable solution to this problem.
Luckily, we have a glass manufacturer, Bullseye Glass, here in Portland, who pointed me towards the tools I needed to start and even gave me a quick glass cutting demo and once I started, I was hooked! Now I have a whole glass wing of my studio (by wing, I mean a 6x3 entryway area to my ceramic studio, but it works!)
The cool thing about stained glass is that I can think up and idea, draw it, make and finish it all in a day. With ceramics, it usually takes about a week from start to finish, so glass scratches that instant gratification itch that you just can't get with ceramics.
