Sage House Glass

Tag: love

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • Audiobook Suggestions from a Full-Time Librarian, Part-Time Artist

    Audiobook Suggestions from a Full-Time Librarian, Part-Time Artist

    I’ve seen a lot of artists compile their favorite playlists for the workshop, so I wanted to take a crack at it. This is where my librarian roots really kick in though, because I love to listen to audiobooks! There are so many different steps to stained glass art and each one requires a certain amount of concentration, but grinding and taping is where I clock the most audiobook minutes.

    Grinding glass might be my least favorite part of the stained glass process, and any glass artist that tells you otherwise is a freakin’ liar. Anything that’ll keep me entertained while I’m making pass after pass against a grinding bit is a godsend. So for any patrons or artists who may be interested, below is a list of my absolute favorite thrillers I’ve listened to while making glass art.

    All of these were checked out on the Libby app through my local library system. If you’re paying for audiobooks..why? Borrow them from the library for free and support your community in the process!

    1. Freida McFadden, “The Coworker” – Such a quirky neurodivergent main character, and I LOVED the twist!
    2. Alice Feeney, “Beautiful Ugly” – l loved the narrator’s voice on this one and it kept me guessing. I remember washing plant stakes in the sink and my jaw dropping, I kept scrubbing just to finish the chapter. Those patinas came out great!
    3. Marisa Kashino, “Best Offer Wins” – Women justifying bad choices is probably my favorite modern literary trope.
    4. Virginia Feito, “Victorian Psycho” – Bret Easton Ellis’ Psycho but Victorian, just as the title suggests. Love an extremely unhinged revenge story.
    5. Lucy Foley, “The Guest List” – A big mix of interesting characters and multiple narrators, it was a very fun murder mystery.
    6. Alex Michaelides, “The Fury” – The unreliable narrator on this audiobook was so good, I’ll forever think about his voice! I must’ve cut a hundred more glass leaves than I needed, getting lost in the book.

    I hope this little list is satisfying, and if you ever need a book suggestion from your resident glass artist/librarian, I’m here for you! Just shoot me an e-mail through the contact form and I’ll make you a custom book recommendation list for any hobby.

    Made this pink plant arch while listening to “Hungerstone” by Kat Dunn!

  • Join Us at Art in the Yard: A Local Artist Community Event

    Join Us at Art in the Yard: A Local Artist Community Event

    EDIT: Due to an IVF-related medical emergency, Sage House Glass was not in attendance at the Art in the Yard market advertised below. The artist is okay and resting!

    Springtime means the roses are in bloom, the earth is waking up and Art in the Yard preparations are in full swing!

    I’ve been working on new pieces for the spring markets and I’m really excited to unveil some meditation hearts, butterfly panels and new framed foliage pieces. Though the art production is going slower (re: life is lifing) I hope the amount of time I’m putting into these new pieces will make them even worthier to grace your window ledges this season.

    Art in the Yard is a very special market run by Christina Brown, better known as Moonbird Soulful Living— a local artist who has created a thriving creative community in North Carolina. I’m honored to be one of the artists featured at Christina’s Art in the Yard experience. The space itself is truly magical–the food, the art, the ambiance–come see what I mean, if you’re a local to Greensboro!

    From Moonbird Soulful Living website: “More than two dozen amazing local artists come together for a joyful day of connection, creativity, and community…It’s more than an Art Market—it’s a celebration of local spirit. Come stroll Art in the Yard, meet the artists, visit with friends and feel the joy of buying from people who make things with heart.”

    Shopping local doesn’t get better than that.

    Joining me at our station will be my sis and forever market partner with her mystery photography drops! Visit her website here for more information on her upcoming collection: Dusk Light Photos

    See you at the market!

    • Art in the Yard 2025
    • Art in the Yard 2025
    • Art in the Yard 205
    • Art in the Yard 2025
  • Life Updates: Art as Therapy

    Life Updates: Art as Therapy

    TW: child loss, infertility

    When I started my little stained glass business, I didn’t imagine I’d be leaving my day job anytime soon. Don’t panic– I’m still not. I love being a librarian by day (with some night shifts and weekends) and I wouldn’t want to abandon all this progress in my career. After ten years in the field, I’m in leadership and staff development. I work with a creative group of very unique people I truly consider family. I get to cultivate community and facilitate story times and programs for children, what could be better than that?

    At least, that’s what I thought before we lost our son. It’s harder these days to work with children–don’t get me wrong, I still love it, but every cooing baby and excited toddler reminds me of the struggles we’re facing in our fertility “journey.”

    After another difficult year of hoping for results naturally, we finally decided to try IVF, something I initially balked at in fear. Injections? Hormones? A thousand blood draws and doctor visits? How could we afford the time, let alone the expense, for IVF? But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and I was determined to be a mom.

    We started IVF in late fall 2025. Months of poking, prodding, needles, appointments, and a non-stop rollercoaster of emotions. Along the way, I’d lost the energy to create anything at all. Stained glass took a back seat, along with almost everything else. The effort was all worth it, though–we have one healthy egg! One perfect little embryo ready for transfer. One chance, really…but at least it’s a chance.

    Making art started as a way to cope with grief and loss, but it has become a persistent metaphor for what I’m going through with IVF. All of these disparate pieces of my life are going to come together like a stained glass panel; all these harsh and broken edges will form some sort of picture, eventually. We will put ourselves back together and draw some light back into our home.

    I’m officially slowing down and smelling the roses until this transfer happens. I’m taking my sweet time when I’m designing and creating new stained glass pieces. I’m making less art, but better art. I’m enjoying what it feels like to really breathe alongside what I’m making, back to the origins of meditative creation. Because all of this? All of this is therapy. It’s all a part of the bigger picture that I’m hoping is being soldered together right now as I type this.

    • The roses in my backyard I’m sitting with this spring