This story originally appeared in Southeast Business Journal:

Jean Peecher is making red, black and white hearts out of glass. She has cut the individual pieces out of sheets of glass, foiled the edges and is now applying solder to hold the pieces together in their heart shape.

“My heart is in Athens,” she says, holding up one of the hearts and explaining her choice of colors. “I’m thinking of calling them Dawg Hearts.” The hearts match the colors of the University of Georgia Bulldogs.

Her latest pieces include a group of angels that she describes as “folk art” angels. She’s also working on a candle shelter featuring a bright, red cardinal – a custom piece requested by someone who is one of Jean’s best customers so far (the candle shelter will be the fourth piece this customer has bought from Jean, even though Jean’s been in business just over three months).

This single-car garage built at the side of her home in Bishop, Georgia, is Mooncalf Glass – a stained art glass studio Jean opened in May of 2015 after her husband sold his business. Both Jean and her husband had worked at the business, and after a decade of doing graphic design work, she now found herself unemployed. When they began talking about what they would do if he sold the business, Jean didn’t hesitate – she wanted to start doing stained glass again.

So the couple invested $500 in equipment and another couple hundred dollars in glass, and a Saturday to clean out the garage that had been used as storage. Jean’s father-in-law built her a work table and a light table, and within a week she was in business, making stained glass again after almost two decades.

Still a newly-wed then and a young mother, Jean moved with her husband to Carrollton, Ga., where he had landed a job in his field. Jean, though, was still trying to figure out what her field was. That’s when her father suggested she should study stained glass with him.

For a decade, John Klemm had run a successful stained glass business in Warner Robins, Ga., and now he was offering to pass down his craft to his daughter.

For several weekends, Jean would visit her parents in Warner Robins, and her father taught her the process of making stained glass.

“I really did enjoy it,” Jean said. “I had never done anything like that with my dad before. It was something he enjoyed doing so much, and I was really grateful for him to teach me how to do it.”

For a couple of years, while living in Carrollton, Jean worked days at the Corner Café restaurant and in the evenings and her days off she worked in a second-floor studio on the square in Carrollton.

“It was a great space,” she said. “It had big windows, and it was on the corner so there was a great breeze that came through the windows. It overlooked the square. It really was a wonderful place to have a stained glass studio.”

There, too, her father-in-law had built her tables. Jean was on the verge of starting a thriving business in Carrollton. She had work on consignment in several area art stores and she had created several custom pieces.

But then, as she says, “Life got in the way.”

The couple moved from Carrollton, so Jean lost her studio space. Then she was pregnant – and pregnant women cannot work with lead – and then she was pregnant again. And before she knew it, it had been 15 years or more since she’d made a piece of stained glass.

“We talked about it all the time, but I never started back. I had given my dad all of my equipment and the tables my father-in-law made,” she said. “When we bought this house in 2012, both my husband and I commented that this extra garage would be perfect for a stained glass studio. When my husband sold his business and I was unemployed, we decided now was a perfect time to start doing stained glass again.”

Jean’s father had died in 2003, so she no longer had the original equipment she used. But a relatively small investment got the equipment she needed to get started again. She found a glass supplier in Winder and found that sharing ideas with other stained glass artists had gotten much easier since the mid-1990s.

“People post patterns and examples of their work online now – that’s something that wasn’t happening 20 years ago. You can get a lot of good ideas and get tips for how to solve problems. And, of course, you can sell work online now.”

Jean uses her website and her Etsy store to sell her work online.

Anyone who knows her knows that Jean loves to wear tie-dye T-shirts. She laughs as she confesses that tie-dye is her standard uniform at work, now.

“I love wearing tie-dye shirts because they’re happy, they’re colorful,” she says. “I do love color, and I think that’s one of the reasons I love working with stained glass so much."

For the full story, visit: http://southeastbusinessjournal.com/2015/09/02/stained-glass-maker-returns-to-her-craft/