A weekend can change your life.
Just ask local artist Nancy Norton, who attended a stained glass-making class and immediately understood that she had found her niche.
"After the first day, I realized I was hooked," said Norton, president of the Blacksburg Regional Art Association. "I told my husband, 'Ugh, this was a big mistake because now all I want to do is stained glass.'"
She said her first teacher wanted all her students to be creative with the glass creations, which still inspires her today.
Norton is resourceful in her creations by not only using glass, but also finding other creative items to incorporate into her work, from shells to parts of wine bottles.
"Glass is a great craft in that you don't need much to get into it," Norton said. "You need a cutter, a grinder and a soldering iron, and with those things you can do a lot."
Her works will often begin with just a single element.
"Sometimes it starts with a piece of glass," Norton said. For one particular piece, the stained glass started with a piece of curved, dark blue glass that she placed in the bottom left corner of the work. From there, Norton made the other pieces fit.
She has also used other objects, such as shells or votive candles as her centerpieces.
"I'm attracted to organic things," Norton said. "I'm attracted to organic forms. I like to use pieces of agate. I like to use shells."
Norton's ability to build a piece around one specific entity is apparent to her fans, too.
"In some pieces it's color, some it's patterns, some are wonderful and whimsical, and others are very strong and bring a real positive message," said Jo Evans, Norton's friend and the director of communications and community relations for the Virginia Tech Arts Initiative. "Each seems to invite me to look at the world in a different way."
Evans said Norton's art has often made her feel reflective. She met Norton through a Blacksburg church and even commissioned a few pieces.
"I feel better, good and responsive in seeing them," Evans said. "That makes me glad, and I stop or pause for a moment."
Norton said she appreciates how flexible she can be with the glass, even though it won't bend to her will.
"The range of glass is just unlimited," Norton said. "It's a very unforgiveable medium in some ways so it's fun to work with it and see how hard you can push it until it breaks on you. And that's been fun, but sometimes frustrating, but that also makes it a lot of fun."
Although watching a piece of glass shatter is somewhat painful, Norton considers it to be an organic part of the process.
"I look at it as this is what the glass wants to do," Norton said.
She refers to each of her pieces as children, and Norton tells the story behind each of her pieces while flipping through a clip book of her work. One Christmas, a client of Norton's asked her to make two pieces: a man riding a bicycle and a purple elephant. She modeled one piece after a potter she met while traveling through France.
She modeled one of her pieces, "Danielle," after a potter she encountered while traveling through France.
"The constant tension is between do you make stuff that you know will sell, or do you make stuff that's interesting to you?" Norton said. "And I err on the side of things that are interesting. And if someone likes them, that's fine."
Although her list of creations includes a business card holder and stained glass windows, her glasswork has recently expanded to vases.
Dale Norton, Nancy's husband, discovered his love for woodturning the same weekend that his wife took her stained glass class, and he is supportive of his wife's craft. He helped her outfit her basement studio in their Blacksburg home.
"She goes outside the box visually. I like most of the pieces she does with shells and agates, slices of stone," Dale said. "She's tried bigger and more ambitious pieces, especially for commissions. It's always changing. She continues to come up with new things to try instead of settling on a product and cranking them out."
He said he admires her originality and the fact that she has the courage to experiment with different forms.
Norton also found the courage to take up a new hobby later in life. She worked as a librarian before taking her first stained glass class in her 50s. She said that even though she found one of her passions late in life, discovering it was transformative.
"I thought, oh well, the creativity fairy passed me by," Norton said. "And when I found this, it was like, oh, there's a language out there that I didn't even know I could speak. It was really life changing for me."
She said she has hope that everyone can find their own "inner artist." Even if it's not until later in life.
"I really think that everybody has one or many ways to express their creativity," Norton said. "They really ought to play around until they find the one they enjoy and the one that fits them."