For February, our event is to honor our longest standing employee, Toby Staenberg, who has been with Glassworks since even the days before we opened our doors. Toby survived a heart attack several years back and has become a spokes person for the Red Dress campaign. In her honor, we invite people to make a check out directly to the American Heart Association, so the individual gets the tax deduction. For each ten dollar check Glassworks will give a 10% project discount, for a $25 check a 25% discount and so forth and so on up to a 50% discount on projects up to $99. Glassworks is giving to the customer and customer is giving to The American Heart Association. Now that is a win-win!

Please join us in our efforts to help fund the research needed to end the number one killer to women: Heart Disease.

Thursday February 28th 6-9 pm at Glassworks Studio

Registration required and available on our events page.

Our March fundraiser will be for animals, in support of a local shelter. More details to follow.

If you are a regular customer of Glassworks and would like us to ocnsider your charity for an upcoming event please let us know.

Now ten years later, Glassworks Studio has served many artists learning a new medium and helped develop others in the medium of glass fusing. Glassworks has welcomed a variety of clients from corporations like Bayer, M&M Mars, Sanofi, Chubb, Oticon all the way to our little friends from various daycare centers around our area. We have had groups of gifted and talented students and groups from ARC and other developmentally challeneged populations.  Patients have come from Morristown Memorial in need of comfort, peace and art therapy. In celebration, we have hosted hundreds of birthday partiess, showers, engagement parties and B’nai Mitzvahs.  In groups, or on their own, our customers have learned an introduction to the art of glass fusing. They have experienced an art form that is over 5000 years old and yet was hardly known to the public before Glassworks opened.

 Over the entire ten years Glassworks has evolved day by day, week by week , project by project.  The past decade has been a learning experience for us, as  we too had to learn about glass fusing and running a walk-in studio for the general public. My junior high school friend, Amy Schwartz, director of  The Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass, cautioned me when I said I wanted to open Glassworks based on the model of the workshop experience offered at the Corning Museum of Glass. Amy said, ” But you don’t know anything about glass!” Amy, all I can say today is “That is not all I didn’t know!! “.  I have learned so much from running Glassworks, and am constantly striving to reconfigure and reconstruct so we can grow and improve each season.  I personally appreciate the patience of both my staff and our customers. We were not reinventing the wheel, we had to design and build it from the ground up.

Now you can find a studio in almost every state where you can  have a glass fusing experience. Mostly they are  part of an established pottery studio or an arts center. We even had a customer from Hawaii where they offered glass fusing on the army base. I am proud of being the person who launched the walk in glass fusing studio to the public sphere and I thank and applaud my friend Amy who started it in the museum setting. Our reconnecting after twenty three years changed my life.

So my thanks are to Amy and her husband Bill, who were the first to invite us into the world of glass. My second thanks go to my husband and parents who believed in me and supported me both financially and emotionally.  And  to my staff, who work so hard and have stayed with Glassworks so long. They always get right behind me with every new idea and change. And of course, I thank all of the customers who made it possible to reach this 10th anniversary; we could not have done it without you! Lastly I must thank my children who never held it against me when I had to choose work over family, who always pitched in when I needed their help, and encouraged me every time I thought things were taking a turn in the wrong direction.  Truly and deeply I thank and appreciate you all.

So to Glassworks Studio’s next ten years…..May they be a blessing as well.

 Learning new things isn’t the only thing I love about this place, it’s also the staff. We have about 17 employees and all of them are a pleasure to work with. We all help each other and get along both at work and outside of work, which makes everything more fun.

Now, there is a down side to working here. Every single time I come in, I want to make something. I always look over the customers’ shoulders to see what they are making, and it makes me want to clock out of work and make a betsy, or a toby, or even a SHAB!

That is our friend, Guy Kass of  Kass Glass and Serendipity Glass. Guy is a wonderful man and a talented artist. His glass skill range is broad and his generosity is apparently endless.  The nature of his work is production, ranging from sandblasting to hot glass for the consumer and corporate markets.  Recently Guy moved his facility to Morristownship just down the road from Glassworks Studio. Since then he has been instrumental in assisting us with engraving  special award projects for local non-profit groups, sandblasting cusotmers fused work and allowing us to use his kiln to keep up with our crazy amount of business over Spring Break.  We owe Guy a huge debt of gratitude and would like to publicly thank him and help him out in any way we can.

So here is our plug for classes being offered at  Serendipity Glass  32 Woodland Avenue Morristown, NJ  973-267-1271. Tell Guy  Glasworks sent you.

Photopolymer Mask and Masking

Sat May 19th and Sunday May 20th: this class is a tour de force of many methods for masking glass for both etching and painting as well as working with both micas and paints.  Further information is available at http:/kaiserglass.com/description.html

Images on Glass

Monday May 21st and Tuesday May 22nd : This class is all about creating images, both by hand and on the computer to be transferred to glass.

Experience with glass is useful, but not mandatory. the cost of each class is $350 which includes all materials and processing plus lunch on the first day.

For questions please contact Barry Kaiser at 336-294-4153 or find more information at http://kaiserglass.com/classdecal.html

Before anything else happens, the kilns happen. First thing even before the purse is put away I have to peak into the kilns. Like a child on Christmas morning I have no ability to delay my gratification, I must unwrap and reveal the magic that happened overnight while we all slept peacefully in our beds and the kiln fairies did their work.

Sometimes the pieces take your breath away and sometimes you want to slam the lid and cry. To all of our dismay, ‘things’ happen in the kilns that are unexpected. Pieces can get stress fractures; they can crack on the ramp up or crack on the ramp down. Glue can be trapped in the layers or slumped pieces can fall unevenly. Thankfully these mishaps are more and more rare as we try to control more and more factors before we fire the pieces. Alas, they still happen to all glass fusing artists and it is a part of the art world each artist must come to terms with in their own way. Luckily for our artists, if the kiln “fairies” caused it we allow a make up replacement piece at no charge.

The kiln firing is just the first step along the way back to the artist. When the kilns are sufficiently cool, each piece is washed and dried. Now it is ready for it’s last stage of processing: hooks, feet, frame, mirror or other findings. Setting time is important, then each piece is finally wrapped, bagged, recorded and set on the shelf for pick up. Whew, who knew how much work went into each piece after you walked out the door!

With the kiln work done, it is time to answer phone messages and emails, catch up on FB, go through the mail and open the door to our customers! On a typical day the first customers in the door are coming to pick up their pieces. We collect their bag, unwrap the pieces to reveal the finished piece and sign out the work.

Are the tables full of glass for customers, are there enough bases prepared, is everything processed from yesterday, are the tables clean and reset…the list goes on and on. The Glassworks staff works tirelessly to prepare the studio for the best customer experience possible. Just as a chef must ‘mis en place’ (prepare the ingredients) so must we!

Ah! A customer has come to create, another to book a birthday party and a third to drop off the school auction project made by the fifth grade class. So I have to go now. We have Kraft foods coming in for a corporate outing and preparations must be made.

Visit us again to learn more about Glassworks Studio, the array of offerings, new materials, and new ideas for group programs.