Meet Jane Drysdale

My children describe me as a craftaholic! In my former life as a Social Worker I used craft as a way to unwind.

I did everything from card making, rubber stamping, silk painting, glass painting, papermaking, candle making, machine knitting, jewellery making, the list is endless and the evidence is in my cupboard under the stairs!

Then in 2002 I bought a glass cutter and a whole new world opened up.

Like so many, I’d been discouraged from being creative.

At school I was told I couldn’t do art because I wasn’t ‘artistic’, whatever that means. But that all changed at my daughter’s birthday party. I was cutting a sweetie mountain cake when I got a call from a man who’d got my number through a dating agency.

I was a single mum of three working as a social worker in Fife, Scotland, and I told this man “I can’t speak now, I’m cutting a sweetie mountain cake!” and he rather liked that, and me…. I did give him a piece of cake.

That man was the managing director of the Perthshire Paperweight Company, among other things. I gave up my career as a social worker, married and moved to Crieff!

I couldn’t cut glass for toffee, I just couldn’t do it.

I became fascinated by glass when I first met my late husband Neil and spent time at his company Perthshire Paperweights. I would never have the resources to be able to work in molten glass but I bought a book and began experimenting with fused glass.

From the first night I watched the temperature gauge on the kiln and drank gallons of tea until the kiln was cool enough to open, I was hooked. My love affair with this medium began and has blossomed over the years expanding from my shed in the garden to the studio at my shop Carnelian Crafts in 2006.

I went with Neil on a sales trip to America where we visited the Corning Museum of Glass in New York. I loved it, especially the intricate botanical-inspired pieces of Paul Stankard, which amazed me. The work I saw on that trip stayed in my head. 

Neil passed away in 2001 and I used he challenge of learning something new as therapy. 

I started with stained glass. 

I went to a couple of sessions of an evening class at Perth College and was raring to get going, I quickly got bored of the stained glass, as I wanted to heat it up, to experiment with it and find it out what happens when you do different hings to it. So I bought a ton of books.

My first one was The Fused Glass Handbook by Gil Reynolds, and I had a go at making some fused glass.

I remember the first time somebody bought something I made. It was a really basic, fused glass piece I’d learned to make from the handbook, and that was it. 

Inspired by Barkley.

As both the shop and the glass businesses have expanded, the decision to move to a swanky new studio meant that it was no longer Glass @ Carnelian Crafts and a new name was needed.

Inspired by my dog, Barkley, Barkley Glass was launched at Scotland’s Trade Fair in January 2015