Glass artists make Nelson home

In a small corner at the Alberene Soapstone Company in Schuyler, two Nelson County artists are hard at work.

With soft, soulful Spanish music in the background, Jay and Steph Rostow of Wingina are using oxygen and propane torches to bend and shape glass into colorful pieces of jewelry.

Jay Rostow, who is originally from California, keeps a thick glass rod turning in his hands as he dips it into the heat of the torch to shape it.

“It starts to become like a flow, or your own little dance if you will,” Jay said. “It can be unnerving sometimes dealing with a hot piece of glass that’s starting to sag. You have to keep it moving to keep it on center.”

The Rostows have been doing lampwork — the term used for their type of glasswork — for almost five years now.

“Neither of us thought of ourselves as being artistic or creative in that way,” Steph said “It’s kind of funny when you delve into something like this and you find out that you really like it.”

Jay learned the trade while visiting his brother in California. When he returned, he passed it onto Steph.

“We’re pretty much self taught as far as it goes,” Jay said.

Steph said the hardest thing for her to remember when she first started was to keep the glass moving.

“One thing with glass is that you have to keep it constantly moving or gravity will take its toll,” she said.

They work at their shop in the soapstone company’s warehouse, which has also doubled as a motorcycle repair and storage area.

Jay and Steph heat glass rods and tubes with the torches and graphite instruments to make beads, pendants, marbles and other pieces.

Color can be added to the clear glass by mixing it with differently-colored glass or heating metals into the glass, Jay said.

Once a piece is finished at the torch, it goes into a small kiln for annealing — a process that allows the stresses in the glass to relax, Jay said.

“The anneanling is to heat the glass up to an almost sort of plastic consistency,” Jay said. “When you blow and twist and poke, you add stress to the glass. If you don’t remove that and let it relax, you risk having the glass crack as it’s cooling down or crack as it’s being worn.”

While Jay is working on his quarter-sized pendants, Steph is carefully placing drops of different colored glass onto a pea-sized bead. Beads are one of her favorite things to make, Steph said.

Their work can be seen almost every Saturday at the Nelson Farmer’s Market in Nellysford. Other than that, their sales come from word of mouth.

“This has been a lot of fun,” Jay said. “It doesn’t make you a ton of money, but it’s a fun hobby.”

Eventually, the Rostows want to move their workshop from Schuyler closer to their home in Wingina.

“This is nice because it’s something that we can do together,” Steph said. “Eventually it’s something that we’d like to have so that we can do it at home. You don’t always feel like driving somewhere to do something. If it’s 8 o’clock at night and we feel like blowing some glass, you can just go out and do it.”

Glass jewelry isn’t all the couple creates. For almost two years, the Rostows have been making wine vinegar on the soapstone company property.

They came up with the idea of making wine vinegar from winery waste products after working for a local winery, Steph said.

“We started to experiment about two years ago with some crocks at our house,” Steph said. “We made some really good batches and we made some really not so good batches. But people seem to really like it.”