“Usually in a small community there’s a big fish in the small pond, and if that big fish went to, say, Chicago, it wouldn’t be such a big fish. In Goshen, though, it feels like there’s a whole lot of big fishes — real talent that’s not just good because it’s a small community, but because it’s REALLY good. I love that about Goshen.
I work with glass and I’ve been doing it for, like, seven years now. I started, every Saturday, learning how to create, and I did that for about a year. I finally started doing it at home, too. What I love about it is that it does kind of remind me of a paint-by-numbers thing, but some of the glass is so cool that you could just frame a piece of glass and be done because the glass is so amazing. I love the process of trying to come up with a design and how to make it so all the pieces of glass are cut in the right way so that it all connects. It’s been fun trying to figure out different ways of doing glass and different designs where you’re like ‘I wanna try that,’ and then you can just do it. That’s the part I really enjoy.
It’s so neat to get to the point where you’ve done it long enough that you can think of an idea and actually do it from beginning to end. It still blows my mind that after you’ve soldered a piece and everything is still silver, you can then put this solution on it and it turns patina. All of a sudden it totally changes the look of the piece in that it was silver and now it’s really dark and the colors of the glass pop out. And from there putting a polish on it and it becomes warmer. I just love going through the whole process.”
