Diane’s Story

How I realized life’s storms create treasures.

I grew up on the San Juan Islands and spent half my waking hours on the beach. Some of the local island dwellers had old Japanese fishing floats decorating their homes. I wanted one! I heard the stories of how these glass floats would break loose from their nets and travel all the way around the world to our coastal beaches. I looked and looked for one of these balls all throughout my young life, but never found one.

I never stopped loving glass.

I ended up going to Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle to study glassblowing and then joined Pilchuck Glass School, founded by Dale Chihuly. I’ve been blessed with a successful career as a glass artist and have been featured in numerous galleries and private and public collections worldwide.

In November of 1999, Ladies Home Journal did an article on women artists, and I was introduced by a mutual friend to Lesli, a model, and asked her to be my stylist for the photo shoot. We struck up an instant friendship.

My mom had been diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer when I first began apprenticing in glass. It was devastating news. 12 years later, in 2002, she finally lost her battle. It was a discouraging time for me. What made it worse was that whenever I opened the paper or turned on the TV, all I saw was negativity and bad news.

In order to create some positive news, Lesli and I, along with a group of local artists and glassblowers, created our own glass floats and hid them around our hometown of Tacoma, so that others could find them, just as I’d longed to find one when I was a kid on the islands. As I remembered my mom and grieved her passing, I still smiled when I imagined someone coming upon a little bit of wonder, in the form of a glass ball.