- I love what I do.

I love interacting with the customers and sharing my art.

Stained glass is an expensive hobby.

So anybody who's interested in it and takes classes, I look at it as preserving an art form.

And there's a rich history of glass art, too.

- [Stefanie] Stained glassmaking hasn't changed much, if at all, over the centuries.

- You need a glass cutter.

There's a couple different pliers that you can use that are very helpful.

A glass grinder, cutting, grinding, foiling.

You use copper foil and then soldering.

So you need a solder iron.

My beginner classes are about six hours to make a project that has eight to ten pieces of glass in it.

Give it a little tug and keep doing that until it comes apart.

I include a lot of history and a little bit of chemistry and physics of glass in those classes because those are things that are interesting to me.

So I like to share them with students.

- [Stefanie] Jean Holland owns Creatively Glass, a small shop that has a lot going on.

For Jean, envisioning herself in this line of work seemed like a natural fit and a bit out of the blue.

- I have always been a crafter.

I started crocheting when I was five.

My parents were farmers.

My mom was a nurse.

So we did a lot of homemaking type of crafts, crocheting, and I made a lot of my own clothes.

Recycled a lot of my clothes into kids' clothes when I had little kids.

The kids had done stained glass in 4-H, and I thought, well, that would be fun.

Maybe I will take a class and do some stained glass.

And in looking at classes, found out that the business was for sale.

And so with no experience in stained glass, no experience in business ownership, I asked my husband, who's the saver in the family, if I could buy a business.

And he said, yeah, sure.

No hesitation whatsoever.

- [Stefanie] Well, that was 10 years ago, and it seems like it's all worked out pretty well.

Stained glass art adorns the windows, hangs from the walls and on shelves.

Tucked into corners are all the supplies you need to do projects at home.

There are weekly classes for people that focus on technique, safety and fun.

- So if it breaks, you work around the break.

- Okay.

- You need to be careful when you're using the grinder about inhaling powdered glass because that's just like asbestos in your lungs.

And then the solder that we work with contains lead, so you have to be careful about that.

Fortunately, we're working at temperatures where lead doesn't vaporize.

So working below that temperature, I usually tell my students the most important thing when we're soldering is don't put your hands in your mouth.

I enjoy talking to customers one on one and helping them with their projects.

When somebody comes in with a pattern and says, can you help me pick out glass?

That's fun.

But I also enjoy the making process and I love the teaching process too.

The most common reaction is wow, I didn't realize there was so much involved in stained glass.

Now I understand why it's so expensive.

- [Stefanie] No previous knowledge is necessary to take part in a class.

They're open to anyone from anywhere.

- You could make these smaller leaves darker or smaller petals darker.

See, when they give it depth.

I'd say the most common is that they just take it home and say that was a nice experience.

I frequently, especially the last couple years, have had couples taking the class together.

So it's just a date night experience for them, something to do.

Once in a while, they'll take the class again and do a little bit bigger project.

Everything is made in Michigan, made here.

To my knowledge, there's not a shop this size north of here.

So I do get customers from the U.P.

and northern Michigan.

I get customers from Cadillac, Big Rapids.

I do have competition in Lansing.

But yeah, there's not another store like this.