Valerie Spellman Batt was raised in Omaha, NE and loved growing up in the Midwest. She caught the stained glass bug back in 1993 and received her glass training in Tucson, AZ and Las Vegas, NV. Valerie says of the Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha where she set up her studio, “The Hot Shops is an incredible and unique creative center that is fast becoming my second home.”
Valerie specializes in custom stained glass windows for the home and business and loves the challenge of coming up with designs that express her client’s desire. She believes the following poem explains her passion:
Cutting Glass
by Jared Carter
It takes a long, smooth stroke practiced carefully
over many years and made with one steady motion.
You do not really cut glass, you score its length
with a sharp, revolving wheel at the end of a tool
not much bigger than a pen-knife. Glass is liquid,
sleeping. The line you make goes through the sheet
like a wave through water, or a voice calling in a dream,
but calling only once. If the glazier knows how to work
without hesitation, glass begins to remember. Watch now
how he draws the line and taps the edge: the pieces
break apart like a book opened to a favorite passage.
Each time, what he finds is something already there.
In its waking state glass was fire once, and brightness;
all that becomes clear when you hold up the new pane.