LAYTON — Connie Johnson's love of working with glass is crystal clear.
Except for the times when it's stained.
It all depends on her latest project at Designer Glassworks, 852 W. Hillfield Road, which she runs with her husband, Jim.
"No job is ever the same," Connie Johnson said. "Even though the skills and the actual doing of the piece is the same, every glass is different . . . .
"The part I like about it is watching it come to life. Once you've drawn it out in black and white, and then you start cutting all the glass, it starts coming together."
Just as the Johnsons' business started coming together two decades ago.
Connie Johnson is a commercial artist who graduated from the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla. She and Jim moved around frequently, since he was a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, so Connie had the chance to try her hand at several different jobs, working with everything from a weekly newspaper and ad agency to an interior design company.
That changed when the Johnsons moved to Utah.
"I fell into it by accident," she said. "About 21 years ago I took a stained glass course, and the rest is history. . . . I started doing pieces for friends and family and going-away gifts for the (Air Force) base. . . . It kind of snowballed, and from that I did art festivals and stuff like that, so we would travel around and set up and sell our wares."
After meeting with success on the road, the Johnsons opened a shop in Roy about 11 years ago. Eventually, they outgrew that spot and decided to move to the 3,500-square-foot Layton location about three years ago.
"I went from being retired and playing golf and traveling and hunting and fishing, and now I work 60 hours a week," Jim Johnson said.
"We specialize in custom stained glass and etched glass. We'll do stained glass for front entries, windows, cabinet doors. We've done domes. We've done quite a few churches. As a matter of fact, we've done five Lutheran churches, and if we do one more, they'll make us convert."
He said custom work is about half of the business for the shop, which has six employees in addition to the Johnsons. Another part is teaching classes on stained glass, leaded glass, etched glass, fused glass and bead-making.
"It's a craft you can learn, but what we teach our students is how to turn it into a piece of artwork," Connie Johnson said.
"We sell glass and supplies to support all of those habits," Jim Johnson said. "We sell lots of unique glass gift items. . . . We do things from as simple as people bringing in wedding glasses to have their names and dates etched on them to the biggest project we've done, which is St. Paul Lutheran Church in Ogden, and that was two 11-by-35-foot windows."
Connie Johnson said it is hard to choose a favorite among the jobs she has done, but if she had to select one, it probably would be the windows she made for a Greek Orthodox church in Ogden.
"There were a lot of figures in that, so it required me to paint the faces and the hands and the feet like the old traditional cathedral windows," she said. "I've done a lot of really nice pieces for people's homes, but I would think that overall my best work would be in that church."
Despite its artistic nature, Designer Glassworks is a business, and Jim Johnson said the administrative duties that go along with small-business ownership have been challenging.
"We're a mom-and-pop organization, and that means that we have to wear different hats at different times," he said. "You've got to put on the bookkeeping hat, and then turn around and put on the . . . marketing hat, and then you have to put on the supervisor hat.
"Some of the administrative things detract from the real enjoyable, creative parts of the work."
Creative work, he said, like taking a project from start to finish.
"I spent 20 years in the Air Force flying airplanes, and when you go out and do an air-to-air engagement . . . there's nothing tangible as a result, nothing you can hold, nothing you can look at," he said. "And that's what I find is the real beauty of this job. You create something that is beautiful and will last and will give others pleasure."
E-mail: gkratz@desnews.com