A glass fantasy’s history

For several years in the mid to late 70s, Vanessa worked as a freelance artist in Southern California—in addition to being a pastel portraitist at Disneyland. During that time one of those jobs is what lead her to learning stained glass. The owner of a tombstone business hired her to design and cut the resist for sandblasting a marble headstone. When she saw it after he sandblasted it, she thought, “I could do this on glass!” After blasting a lot of designs on glass, she decided they needed colored glass around them. Luckily one of her sisters had just taken a stained glass class at the local community college and showed her the basics of cutting glass and working with lead came—although the teacher had taught the students to cut the lead with a razor blade! Needless to say, there was some re-learning for her.

In the 90s when her two kids were old enough to keep bugging her, but still too young to be in her studio, Vanessa, decided to take a step back from stained glass, only taking a few jobs here and there throughout the years. Her focus became raising her kids and running her face painting and party entertainment business.

By the time her third daughter had graduated high school in 2018, Vanessa was fully ready to jump back into making stained glass full time. But the market had changed, and you couldn’t just put an ad in the phone book anymore. Realizing a need to modernized, Vanessa brought on her daughter Amy to help build the online presence and drag her into the 21st century. With the expert teaching from Vanessa, Amy quickly became a talented stained glass artist. Today, you’ll find the two of them either teaching their stained glass workshops or working together in the studio to bring more magic into the world.