My Glass Journey

I’ve had a really blessed art/glass journey. I have a photography undergraduate degree and a masters degree in Professional Media and Media Management. I worked at Southern Illinois University and during my 30 year career I took advantage of the Student Center’s Craft Shop. A friend and I enjoyed all the art classes taken there! So when I needed to preserve some historic glass panes from a building in my small hometown, I took the stained glass class offered at the university and thus my glass journey began!

Shortly after working with stained glass, I found fusing. I immediately fell in love with the process and to really learn the technical side of it I studied with Miriam DiFiori in Mornico Losana, Italy. There I learned my basic skill set and I continued to study over the years with various classes, tutorials and LOTS of practice. I feel that artists should never stop learning! Studying new techniques and working with different types of glass mediums and processes has helped me to become a well-rounded glass artist.

Toward the end of my career at SIU, I began to teach glass fusing in the same Craft Shop where I was first introduced to it. I volunteered until retirement, then opened my own glass shop to teach glass fusing and learned to make murrini and millefiori from Lori Moreno.

Since Covid, I stepped away from teaching and just create murrini. I spend about 50 hours a week in my glass shop to be able to create as much murrini as I do, but it is my joy. I’m a perfectionist, so I'm very particular with the murrini I sell. That is why I take the extra step to anneal all my canes and test all my murrini designs under polarizing filters. I also have a very stringent quality control process. I do this because I’m truly honored to have my artwork incorporated in the work of other glass artists and I want it to be the best murrini possible.

I’m lucky enough to still have my parents with me and want to be available to them at all times, this is why I only ship twice a week, so I’m free during the week to create and help them as needed (we go one day at a time around here 😉). This is also another reason for having new murrini posting on the 1st and 3rd Saturday of each month. This way I can spend more time with them every other weekend. I know my store isn’t always full, and some weeks I'll have more new offerings than others, but my philosophy is quality over quantity and family before murrini.