Stacey Schlosser can be forgiven if she looks glassy-eyed after her 50th birthday.
Call it an occupational hazard.
On Thursday she celebrated the 10th anniversary of Glassworks, the Morristown studio she opened to mark her 40th birthday.
At that time, it was an abrupt departure for someone who had worked for a giant department store and taught in a Montessori school.
In fact, Stacey even considered an old junior high school friend’s glassblowing career as “kooky.” Until she actually paid a visit to the friend and her husband in upstate New York.
“I thought I would find two hippies blowing glass in some run-down town,” she recounts. “But he is a world-class glassblower. They are highly intellectual, successful people in a field I knew nothing about.”
With support from her husband, Bill, and her dad, Stacey threw herself into her new avocation.
A decade later, Glassworks has become a popular place for organizational outings and even first dates.
For a few dollars you can spend a relaxing evening learning to make pretty ashtrays, bowls, and objets d’art…while learning about your fellow artisans.
“Are they meticulous and tedious? Or do they just throw it down?” says Stacey, whose birthday was Saturday. “Can they be symmetrical, or asymmetrical?”
Photos by Scott Schlosser. Please click icon below for captions.
At Thursday’s celebration, Morristown Mayor Tim Dougherty and Morristown Partnership Executive Director Michael Fabrizio presented a plaque to Stacey.
“Anyone who’s in business 10 years nowadays deserves a lot of credit,” Michael says in the video above.
Amen to that!
Stacey is aiming for another decade of success. That was no surprise to her husband, who still marvels at her energy and compares her to the Unsinkable Molly Brown.
“If she didn’t create Glassworks,” Bill says, “she would have had another idea a month later, then another until she finally got something up and running.”
How fabulous Stacey!! Congratulations on all your hard work!