January Studio Notes

Have you ever lost a favorite earring?

I did 23 years ago and that was the beginning of my business WindHorse Arts. I'm going to tell you about the earring, but first let me tell you what I do and how I do it.

My work is all about color and I have over 200 different colors of glass that I work with, each piece that I make has 3-4 layers of glass - which means the color possibilities are endless.

Since WindHorse Arts launch in 2000, I have personally crafted each piece, working with sheets of colored glass, a glass cutter, and a 1500 degree kiln. What emerge from the fire are rare pieces of captured light in a brilliant spectrum of colors.

To create pieces simultaneously elemental and personal I draw inspiration from the landscape – sea and stone, forest and sky of my island home, from the people who love my jewelry and from the music and stories always playing as I work.

A little note about glass -  it is essentially a liquid that hardens into an uncrystallized state without ever becoming a true solid.  It also stores and transmits vibrations, which I think makes it magic.

And I get to spend my days playing with color and glass which is a far cry from how I spent my days in the mid 90s

At that time I was working in a bank making loans to businesses and I just knew there had to be more …. More to life

Then one Monday morning Betty, my coworker, walked through the doors, plopped down in her chair, untied her sneakers, slipped on her dress shoes and let out a sigh “I can’t wait till Friday”

So ... I left that career and I started off on a quest to live the life I imagined

I tried dozens of jobs and self employed ventures and finally I took my moms advice and I listened to The Artist's Way, a course in unblocking creativity and I left the big city and I moved back to Maine where I always knew I belonged, but I still couldn’t find work - work that supported me, work that nourished me energetically work that I never wanted to retire from.

Now back to that lost earring.

One bright spring day, the year I moved back to Maine, I was in an abandoned quarry in Frankfurt Maine scavenging for granite to build a garden wall and I lost one of my favorite earrings

so I started another quest to make a match for the remaining favorite earring

and after a year and half of carrying the talisman earring in my pocket and asking everyone that I ran into what it was I finally discovered that it was fused dichroic glass and then the work started

I learned about glass, fusing, design and kilns. I used my business skills honed over my years as a commercial lender to determine if this could be a viable sustainable business and the answer was a resounding yes!

So, I started making earrings and people loved them so much so that they were buying them right off my ears. Shortly after that I opened my first studio and store and that combination has resulted in an ongoing collaboration between me and my customers which has supported the growth of WindHorse Arts over the past 22 years

~ the quest for a new and better way to live

~ the collaboration with my customers

~ and the magic that is glass

That is WindHorse Arts and that is how it all started with a lost earring.

Wishing you a joy full new year

In good health, Alison