Ask Shannon Morgan how long it takes to create a single goblet or bowl, and she’ll likely tell you, “About 20 years plus 20 to 40 minutes.” The 53-year-old owner of Girl Glass is one of the few females in the glass-blowing industry, but she’s been making a living at her craft and expanding her four-woman business in Sacramento for more than two decades.
What began as a solo, home-based operation has grown into a two-location company with apprentices, hands-on classes and a retail gallery.
For years, Morgan’s home studio was open to the public. The foot traffic was minimal, so her South Sacramento neighbors didn’t mind. But a 2011 Groupon changed that. Morgan thought she would sell 300 coupons — maybe — for couples to come blow glass. She sold almost 1,000.
It was the catalyst for an expansion to a midtown location and a catalyst for business growth. “Not bad for a girl,” her male counterparts would tell her. In 3,000 years of glass-blowing history, not a single woman was mentioned until the American Studio Glass Movement began in the 1960s.
That’s largely due to the nature of the labor, which includes intense, continuous heat (the furnace tops 2,000 degrees, so males traditionally worked shirtless) and requires substantial upper-body strength. Thankfully for Morgan, those requirements played into her background as a powerlifter and rugby player.
Shannon Morgan and her three apprentices and assistants create all manner of objets d’art at the Girl Glass glass-blowing studios in South Sacramento and midtown. But what they’re really known for is pumpkins.
The four women blow thousands of pumpkins every year and retail them for $25 to $400 a pop. The little glass gourds make their way to four glass-pumpkin patches annually, including a massive art installation at the Morton Arboretum, in Lisle, Ill., where the women display and sell close to 2,000 creations in a single weekend.
They also bring a portable furnace for live demonstrations and pumpkin-blowing classes. In California, similar annual pumpkin patches take place in the fall in Elk Grove, Los Gatos and Palo Alto.
Girl Glass is one of the few female-owned and run glassblowing businesses
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