Week 7 | Post A

This week I liked the following businesses as my page:

Stained Glass by Mary - I hadn't heard of this page before, but it came up with a Facebook search for "stained glass".  While Mary's style is a bit more traditional than my preference, I love that she posts frequently and engages with her audience.  And, she's amassed 13k followers in a little over a year!  That's amazing!  According to her posts she recently switched to running her stained glass business full time and I truly admire artists that can do that.  I don't even know her but I'm cheering her on from afar!  By liking this page I hope to be able to get daily doses of inspiration and perhaps little insights into how to pull an income from stained glass, as I'd like to retire into it some day.

Beveldine Stained Glass - This is another artist page I wasn't familiar with, but this business appears to specialize in stained glass restorations.  I've done a few repairs (mostly on my own pieces that I broke in finishing) so the posts here offer an interesting view on techniques that I could certainly improve on and offer as a service.  Plus, the company posts fairly frequently so that's always a plus!

Stained Glass Association of America - I have to admit, I'd never heard of the Stained Glass Association of America, which is odd because I feel like it would have come up in my stained glass group (my glass mosaic group talks about its associated trade group constantly).  But, this showed up in my Facebook search so I took a look.  Fortunately, this looks like my kind of page!  They post frequently, and post a variety of content that keeps the page fresh and interesting.  It's a range of showcasing work, advertising works that the public can go see, how stained glass has played a roll in peoples' lives, and more.  All interesting, informative content that I look forward to browsing and possibly using as interesting "sharable" content on my page.

Stained Glass News - Fortunately, I have heard of this publication from my stained glass group.  Some of the group's members are even featured on occasion!  This page is especially interesting to me because instead of flouncy articles about ancient stained glass, this dives into the functional aspect of it with tutorials, product reviews, and news on up and coming artists.  It'd be neat to get my patterns or pieces featured in it and get more traffic to my social media and Etsy in response.

Bullseye Glass Co. - Due to necessity, I've started working with more Bullseye glass lately (I wrote about my the difficulties my favorite manufacturer - Spectrum - is having in a recent post).  While I can't say I love working with it, the glass is genuinely beautiful and has great "personality".  By liking this page I hope to learn more about their products and perhaps even pick up some tips along the way.  Using a variety of glass in my work also helps to make the work I post more interesting.  I could also start tagging the company whose glass I used (if I could manage to keep track of what's what) and perhaps even get a shoutout on social media!

Youghiogheny Glass - Youghiogheny Glass is another glass manufacturer whose products I've started using due to Spectrum's troubles.  And like Bullseye, their glass has its own feel too!  While their page is a little sparse on variety of content, they do seem to post frequently so I feel like I can actually learn something by following them.  I could take the same approach to tagging the manufacturer here and perhaps get a shoutout.

Surfing Madonna Oceans Project - Funny enough, the Surfing Madonna was the spark that got me into stained glass.  I'd been toying with the idea that glass art sounded interesting and my grandparents had taken a few classes, but I didn't really know where to start.  And then when the Surfing Madonna showed up, technically as vandalism, it was a curious juxtaposition of illegal and beautiful.  Though this piece is a mosaic, it still explored glass in an interesting way, plus I appreciated its quirky take on the Virgen de Guadalupe and I support its message of conservation and caring for the Earth.  This piece will always be special to me.  Perhaps if this project ran a craft fair I could participate and drum up more traffic to my social media.