Sage House Glass

Author: Samantha M.

  • Upcoming Glass Art Commissions and Personal Projects

    Upcoming Glass Art Commissions and Personal Projects

    It’s been a very long summer! A summer I’m incredibly grateful for, but also still recovering from. I’m the kind of exhausted that’s bone deep. And I don’t anticipate the exhaustion to go away anytime soon–which is another thing I’m grateful for, but hopefully more to come on that in the future.

    In regards to glass, I’ve been working on several projects at once, all with some pretty intense deadlines.

    • Fall Drop at Minkology by September 10th, including pumpkins, autumn leaves, ghosties and lightning bugs.
    • A full stock of celestial and fantasy items for the Moonfire Realms Renn Faire happening September 26th at Rubicon Farm, NC. Check it out!
    • Several personal close-to-the-heart commissions for family members, including birth flowers, suns, poppies and more; some were completed in early July and others in the planning stage for late September.
    • And one really elaborate post-card reproduction of the Hotel del Coronado for my brother and his wife by August 30th. This one’s a secret! And I’m cutting it close.

    The Hotel del Coronado project deserves its own post, so I’ll save the bulk of that adventure for next week. I’m past the cutting and grinding at this point, so we’re onto wrapping these truly infinitesimally small pieces, that I designed because I’m a sadist. I might also be one of those people that’s like, “Eh, I’ll make it work.” Confidence or laziness? Both are the father of invention.

    I’m looking forward to producing gifts for friends and family in the season to come. I want to pull back a bit on crafting for production and instead focus on the really personal touches commissions can make. It means so much to me that people trust me to replicate or translate something special to them into glass, whether it’s a memory, tribute or totem. I’m honored, and I take every commission with that level of gravity.

    But that’s commissions–sometimes I get to go really crazy and try new things when I’m making fun gifts for family members, so my brother’s Coronado piece is going to be the height of creativity and a total deluge of trial and error. Fun, light-hearted, and totally unserious. I hope he’ll love it!

    Check in next week if you’re interested to see the entire artistic process behind bringing a classic Californian landmark into colorful glass.

  • Collection Drop: Garden Medallions out now!

    Collection Drop: Garden Medallions out now!

    It’s drop day!

    I’m so intensely proud of these Edwardian stained glass florals, if you haven’t seen them on my socials–check them out. I’ve got process videos and a lot of reels pairing the different colorways to specific Disney princesses, pictured below.

    Pocahontas Poppies
    Aurora’s Tulips
    Belle’s Rose
    Tiana’s Rose

    I wasn’t actively imagining color combinations for princesses when I was making this first collection, but it was a happy accident. When I completed the rose medallion I was struck by how “Belle” it looked–evoking the narrative scene at the beginning of Beauty and the Beast, when the story is being told in stained glass. It gave me a very fairytale feeling, so I started to imagine all the different princesses who would have hung these glass pieces from the castle windows or towers or Grandmother Willow branches.

    This drop is small! And the pieces themselves are small, only 6 x 4 ovals. They’re being used as an interest gathering mission, if you will. What floral medallions are most popular, what colorways are a favorite?

    It’s also my first time really attempting a drop on my new website, so I hope this goes smoothly! Please bear with me as I work out the kinks, if there are any. If certain medallions are already spoken for, I’ll be taking backorders with a 2-4 week creation window for certain colorways. Some glass is limited edition! Please e-mail me through the contact page if you have any issues with that.

    Thanks for all the support and love as I start figuring out these online spaces and move further away from Etsy. More in-person markets to come, but I’m so excited to grow this space. Cheers!

  • The Art of Writing About Art

    The Art of Writing About Art

    I started this blog in conjunction with my stained glass website for a couple of reasons. For one, I just love writing about art and stained glass. I am deeply enthusiastic about promoting artists, describing the stained glass process and ruminating on my inspirations. Writing about the intentions driving my art really helps to remind me of the “why.”

    The “why” is fundamental to art being more than just a “side hustle.” I’m often plagued with the Capricorn tendency to make sure every moment of my day is *productive.* If I’m not doing three things at once, maximizing my time, crossing things off a list–well, then I’m just not reaching my full potential, right? But now that I’m older and possibly wiser, I’m realizing how fast time is flying while I’m multi-tasking my life away. Art can be mindful. Art can help me slow down. Art doesn’t always have to be productive, a business, something to mass produce. It’s valuable on its own. The act of making is valuable.

    The act of writing about making–that’s valuable too, for me. Often I can find myself creating with abandon and focusing so much on the end result that I’m not taking the time to enjoy the process. Being mindful of my “why” can slow down the pace of what I’m doing and help me to learn more about myself in the process. Why do I favor these colors, this texture, that shape? What mood am I trying to evoke for someone else viewing the piece? What does my art remind me of, why is it comforting to me, what memory does it touch in the back of my mind?

    I’ve also learned that if something doesn’t exist on the internet that you wish existed on the internet, then maybe you’re the one that has to make it. I would love reading a weekly blog for stained glass artists rather than just endlessly scroll TikTok videos in the community. I’m much more interested in the old style of connection: message boards, chat rooms, blogrolls. I’m only 37, okay, but I do miss the golden age of the internet. Instagram and TikTok can only do so much to connect people, and it’s really just a place for most people to lurk. Don’t get me wrong, I love making reels as much as the next stained glass artist, but I miss longform content! I’m probably the only one.

    I love writing about stained glass art and how my life is growing alongside my skills. I’m holding onto my intention and making sure everything I design and create is filtered through that purpose.

  • Florals for Summer? Groundbreaking

    Florals for Summer? Groundbreaking

    June & July months are so incredibly freaking hot in the south. I’ve barely been able to work in my garage because the heat dome is too intense–we’re working on getting air conditioning in there, but in the mean time, we’re sweating. Sometimes I’ll be in my little stained glass corner grinding glass pieces while my husband is doing wood working on the other side of the garage. When we take off our PPE we look like victims of drowning.

    This June, I did have the pleasure of making another commission for a good friend out in California. She was hoping for a floral piece, possibly a tulip or a rose, for her friend who loves to garden. I wanted to create a medallion shape; a folklore feel, a bucolic aesthetic. So I reached out onto the web and found Dutch tulip florals and medieval roses, using those as inspiration for a new line of oval medallion suncatchers.

    I sent the commission, but I couldn’t stop making the florals. I’m up to my nose in little tiny pieces of flowers. At this point, I’ve designed tulips, roses, poppies (couldn’t help myself) and peonies. The peony is a little outside my wheelhouse, but I’m doing my best with all the tiny little petals.

    The color combinations are reminding me so much of the Disney princesses that I’m referring to colorways as specifically princess-inspired. So far I’ve got the Belle, the Aurora, the Pocahontas, and the Tiana. Elsa, Anna and Ariel to come! Below is a small preview of just Belle & Aurora, but I’m looking forward to having time next week for a real photo shoot for the other colorways.

    I never know when a commission is going to help me grow in another direction! I love florals, plants and gardens, so this flows incredibly well with everything else I love to make. Cheers to a whole new floral category in my store front–coming soon!

  • Yoga for Stained Glass Artists

    Yoga for Stained Glass Artists

    I think most artists would agree that making, crafting, and creating is a physical act. Artists put their blood, sweat, and tears into their projects–emphasis on the “blood” for stained glass artists. Memo: glass can be sharp.

    We often put our backs into what we love, and then throw our backs out in the process. It’s easy to shrug and say it’s the cost for creating. The aches and pains in our arms, wrists, legs and necks can be a testament to a job well done: an afternoon spent on hyper-focusing, a late night fully invested in the minutiae, a few precious hours of uninterrupted creation. And then you wake up out of your fugue state and realize you’ve been in the same position for four hours with your neck in that weird tilt, your wrists locked up with overuse, and you’re screwed because you’re in your thirties and you forgot to stand up and drink water at least once an hour. Is that just me?

    I don’t feel like I’m alone in needing to physically decompress after a few hours of intense crafting, so I’m compiling a playlist of yoga stretches for the stained glass maker. There are some great resources out there for artists of all varieties, but this playlist is going to be heavy on the wrist, neck and back stretches for hours spent hunching over glass pieces, soldering away.

    Sometimes time just doesn’t exist when I’m smoothing out some juicy lines of solder on a suncatcher. Clocks don’t hold a candle to the flow state. But when that happens, god forbid I have to shelve books at the library the next day–I’ll bend down and never get back up.

    Prioritizing my health (physical and mental) has been one of the hardest things I’ve learned to do over the years. At the end of the day, it’s pretty easy to take five to ten minutes to shake out the strain and stretch the stress from my shoulders–all the stress that accumulates from making art, but also work and life and plans and all the things that build up over a lifetime of being busy. I’m discovering that the more I focus on easing that concentrated stress from my muscles, the easier it is for me to just function well.

    Dropping my stained glass artist playlist here, made on my new YouTube channel! The playlist itself is collaborative, so if you’re an artist and you have videos you’d like to include, please let me know. I’ve been doing yoga for over 20 years now, so I hope to someday start sharing my own stretch routines for stained glass artists on the channel. Thanks for following along and I hope I see you on the mat!