Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
We all remember adults asking us when we were young, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Visions of being a doctor, a teacher, a fireman or an astronaut danced in our heads as we dreamed about the future.
For Richwood and Woodrow resident Karen Wakefield, her second-grade self only saw visions of glass blowing.
“I kind of found my identity as an artist when I was little,” she said. “I think I was in second grade, we went to see my grandparents – my mom’s parents – for a week in the summertime and they took us to a glass factory.
Wakefield grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and her grandparents lived in Uniontown, but that summer, they took a trip to West Virginia to a glass factory. Although she can’t remember the name, it was more than likely Fenton Glass, located in Williamstown.
At that time, the factory had tours where visitors could see glass makers in action. Whatever factory it was, the tour sealed the deal for Wakefield.
“They were doing a glass blowing demonstration, but yet, I know a lot of them did pressed glass and molds,” she said. “The guy let me blow on the end of the pipe. Of course, I didn’t do anything, but I thought I did. I said, ‘I want to blow glass.’ That’s when I fell in love with glass.”
Wakefield started collecting glass paperweights and continued to nourish her love of art by taking as many classes as possible.
When she was in the fifth grade, she wanted to take a painting class at the local art association, but it was for adults. Her mother spoke to the professor who was offering the class, and he said to have her come in and show him her artwork.
Wakefield showed the professor some of her best drawings and he admitted her to the class.
“I still have one or two of the paintings that I did back then,” she said.
In high school, Wakefield was fortunate the school had a well-funded and well-rounded art department. This is where she first began her work with jewelry.
[They] had a full jewelry lab and clay lab, so in high school I was doing copper enameling, I was doing casting, I was doing soldering,” she said. “I was doing all the components of making jewelry that most high schools don’t have in their lab.”
After graduation, Wakefield attended Millersville University where she got a degree in graphic design. She knew she was more likely to get a job with this degree than with a fine arts or interior design degree.
Wakefield worked at a weekly newspaper as a paste-up artist while attending school. That is where her graphic design skills were first put to work. She did ad layout at the newspaper and also helped do touchups on negatives of the newspaper’s pages before they were sent to the press.
Wakefield went on to get an art teaching degree but only spent three years in the classroom before she was recruited by the school system to do public relations and marketing.
She continued to get jobs utilizing her graphic design and communication skills, including at the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency and for Bon-Ton Stores.
As she built her career from place to place, Wakefield’s dream of being a glass artist never diminished. In 2003, she took a class that helped her to finally realize that dream.
She was working in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the time and her regular route to and from work took her by a stained-glass shop. She checked out the shop’s website and saw there was a class on making glass beads.
“I was like, ‘what? You can make your own beads?’” she said, excitedly. “It just didn’t occur to me. Obviously, someone made them somewhere. I thought, ‘I’ve got to do this.’ So, I took the class.”
In that class, Wakefield got a starter kit and learned how to make her own glass beads with a hot head torch, welding rods and colorful glass rods.
The welding rods are dipped in a clay solution that keeps the melted glass from sticking to the rods. Then the glass rods – which are pencil shaped – are heated to a melting point and the maker wraps the molten glass around the welding rod to form the bead.
“It’s a little bit of a dance to get the glass around there,” Wakefield said. “That’s how you make a basic bead. After you have the basic bead. Most of my beads are frit beads. Frit – if you think of the pretty colored sugar that you might put on a cookie, it’s basically like that. It’s glass that has been ground up into little sugary chucks.
“While my bead is still soft and molten, I just roll it through there like you decorate a cookie,” she continued. “Then it will melt into the glass and provide all the pretty colors.”
There are several techniques in glass bead decorating, such as adding dots and then twirling the bead to make stripes, or making flowers with well-placed dots.
“You can get really fancy with them,” Wakefield said. “You can twist two colors together and pull them out. It’s like Christmas candy. If you ever look at one of those paperweights that looks like millefiori with little tiny flowers, that’s how those are made.”
After buying a place in Woodrow in 2022, Wakefield visited the Pocahontas County Artisans Co-op 4th Avenue Gallery in Marlinton, where she soon became a member. She juried into the gallery and into Tamarack at the same time.
In addition to her jewelry, which features custom glass and resin beads, Wakefield also sells mixed media pieces featuring her photography. She was inspired to capture the beauty of West Virginia wildflowers when she saw the variety that the state has to offer.
“I love the wildflowers down here; absolutely insane,” she said.
While she will always be a native Pennsylvanian, Wakefield said coming to West Virginia felt like coming home. It happened the first time she and her husband vacationed at Blackwater Falls years ago before they even considered retiring to the Mountain State.
“When we came down through, I don’t know, something happened in my heart,” she said. “I felt like I came home. That’s the weirdest, goofiest sounding thing, but I really felt like my heart was coming home.”
Now that she has made West Virginia her home, she continues to create her artwork and share it with locals and visitors alike.
