Welcome to Hogan GlassWorks!

We are a husband and wife team of lampwork glass artists based out of the Pacific Northwest. We started Hogan GlassWorks and Jess Hogan Designs in 2004, but before that we both graduated from the University of Oregon and held jobs in the real world.

Scott was an architect in his former life and hated the day-to-day grind of sitting in a cubical, drawing someone else’s ideas, and never seeing the finished product. Now he uses his design skills to build all of our display pieces and other elements of our business.

In her previous life, Jess worked with behaviorally challenged children at a psychiatric residential unit. Glasswork was what she did instead of drink every night after work. Now Jess uses her psychology background to watch and learn from the behaviors of the people around her at shows, you'd be surprised how much you can learn just by watching so many people walk by.

At shows, people often ask us where we live and the joke has become that, we pay a mortgage in Portland, Oregon (not that we’re ever there). We travel from show-to-show, mostly in Washington and Oregon, staying in Gig Harbor, Washington when we're doing shows in that area. Our cats, Spaz & Buddy, travel with us between home bases and they seem to have gotten pretty used to traveling in the car, or at least the protesting has begun to die down.

The other question we are often asked is, how did we get started in lampworking and jewelry design. The answer to that question takes us back to when Jess was a kid. As the stories from friends go, she's been making and selling jewelry since elementary school when she made things out of paperclips, string, and plastic beads and traded them at recess for Salal leaves (the currency on the playground at the time). Over time, Jess became aware of different types of beads, including lampworked beads, and also started reading beading magazines. One particular magazine regularly featured articles about individual lampwork artists. After reading an article about the self-proclaimed smart-ass-glassworker, Sharon Peters, she became interested in trying her hand at lampworking and signed up for a class taught by Andrea Guarino-Slemmons. When that class was over, she walked out of it literally shaking with excitement and begged Scott to let her buy the torch and tools to set up a studio at home. Scott thought it was incredibly funny that Jess wanted to go buy tools, and said sure. The first time Jess sat down at her home torch, Scott watched and said, "Can I try that?" From that point on we were both hooked. It didn't take long for the hobby to turn into an obsession and that obsession to lead us to try selling our work for the first time. After our first show, we realized that we could in fact make a living at this if we worked hard and thus Hogan GlassWorks was born (of course the insurance payout after our car was totaled while at that show didn’t hurt).

What is lampworking?
Lampworking is the process of melting glass over a torch to create the desired object. Glass itself is brittle at room temperature, but with heat, it becomes fluid. We use soda-lime glass (soft glass) that comes in the form of a rod, in all of our work. The oxygen-propane torches we use in lampworking must reach temperatures of at least 1400 degrees in order to make the glass molten and workable. We are regularly asked if we burn ourselves often and Jess' answer is that she doesn't burn herself very often because she's patient, but Scott on the other hand burns himself on a regular basis because he doesn't like to be patient and glass rods tend to shatter when heated too quickly. Apparently he’s willing to put blood, sweat, tears and flesh into his work.

To make a bead, we take a thin steel mandrel (rod) and wrap the molten glass around it to form a basic bead. After that, the glass can be shaped using a variety of tools. Surface decorations, such as stringer (thin strands of glass), frit (small chunks of glass), silver leaf, and various specialty or reactive powders, can also be applied for added effect. The trick during the working process is to keep the bead on the mandrel and not in a soupy pile on the table.

Once the bead is finished, it is put into a kiln to be annealed. Annealing is a process of heating and slowly cooling the bead to reduce internal stress, making it durable and of heirloom quality. The cheap lampwork beads many people are familiar with are not annealed and that is why most of them have visible cracks or shatter when they are dropped, our beads have been carefully annealed and many of them actually bounce when dropped on concrete.

Where do our bead designs come from?
Many people ask where we get our bead design ideas. Our response is, where do painters or sculptors get their ideas from? It can be something as simple as the veins in a leaf, as complicated as an abstraction from a much larger work of art we saw, or just from a figment of our imaginations that we were able to bring to life. By the time our original ideas turn into a final bead style, we've usually forgotten where the initial inspiration came from. Lampworking is very much a meditative process for each of us and we regularly surprise ourselves by what we create.

Where do our jewelry designs come from?
On a basic level, all of our jewelry designs came from our need to find a way to market our lampworked beads to people who appreciate them but do not want to make their own jewelry out of our loose beads. Over time, our jewelry designs have evolved into our current styles; focusing on the display of our art glass beads as the single most important design element. Every one of our jewelry designs makes a point of showing off the colors, textures, and artfulness of our glass. As artists, our mission has always been to provide a piece of art that people can enjoy on a daily basis and share with those around them rather than keeping it shut away in a room.

All of our earrings are made using only our glass beads, plain and simple, no imported distractions. Each earring only uses one of our glass beads to keep the design simple, yet bold.

Our lariet-style necklace features a thin silver chain with a toggle-clasp. The toggle stays in the front and becomes a design element along with the three-tiered beads. The other advantages to having the toggle-claps in the front is that first, you don't have to keep chasing the clasp around the back of your neck all day like a traditional clasp, and second, it is easier for most people to put on the necklace without assistance. (Though Scott usually reminds the husbands that even if they are needed for assistance, at least they get to see the “fun” parts rather than the back of their neck.)

The floating bead-style necklace features five of our glass beads suspended on an incredibly durable nylon cording. When we were first starting out with jewelry designing, we actually bought a fishing scale to test the durability of our designs. This particular necklace style held more than 10 pounds of shear yanking on it before the metal piece that holds the clasp on bent and released the clasp, a part that almost anyone with a pair of pliers can bend back. This necklace has also been designed with balance in mind to keep the clasp from traveling around to the front.

We are continuously playing with new ideas for jewelry styles and those who visit our booth at a show on a regular basis will see a new one come out occasionally. We always have fun showing our customers the new items we have brought out since they last saw us.

Where can our work be seen or purchased?
First and foremost, we strongly encourage anyone with the opportunity to come see our work in person either at a show, one of our open studios, or at one of the stores that carry our work. The reason why we encourage this is because we understand how difficult it is to buy jewelry and beads sight unseen. It has always bothered us that some jewelers and bead suppliers will send out sub optimal product because the person buying sight unseen "won't know the difference." This is why we promise to always choose the pieces that we would want to receive if we had been the purchasers.

As far as making a jewelry choice on our website, we have chosen to only feature the specific jewelry and bead combinations that have proven their popularity in our booth over time. If you have seen something in our booth or are interested in something that you don't see on our website, please feel free to contact us for a custom design.