Features Column
Career change adds more meaning to life for Beaverton woman
(Jennifer Priest Mitchell is a freelance writer in Beaverton. She can be reached at jnjmitchell@yahoo.com.)
“I guess you could say that my hobby is trying different stuff … I like to try as many different things as I can. In the end of your life, that’s what you end up with is your memories, so I want to have a lot of them to reflect upon,” shared Carli Schultz Kruse with a relaxed smile.
You might think someone who is so open-minded would lack focus, but that is certainly not the case with Kruse. For a woman in her mere 30s, she has experienced quite a lot, and she recently had the courage (and, she admits, great support of her husband and fiends) to make a dramatic career change, and she is making the most of it.
After a decade of web design in California and Oregon, this East Coast native decided to follow her heart and turn a much-loved hobby into a business.
“There are so many different ways to work with glass!” she said. “I am doing two of them a lot right now, one of which is lamp working, the older term, or some people now call it flame working. I create glass beads. Then I also do glass fusing, and with that I make small necklace pendants and plates and bowls, and components of jewelry, as well as plates up to 15 inches in diameter.”
Kruse does more of the lamp working these days and confesses that it is her current favorite style of glass working.
“The fusing is great, but it can take 12 hours of time to make a bowl or a plate’s first phase, and it can take up to days or weeks to finish a project, depending on what it is. You must be a lot more exacting in that type of work — as in baking.”
While she did not necessarily grow up thinking this was her dream job, Kruse does have a special memory in her heart of when her parents took her to the Corning Glass Museum in New York.
“I saw this man making a poodle of clear glass … and I thought he was the neatest person. My parents then bought me a little glass poodle and I was just fascinated with it, and with the process of making it.”
A few years ago, a fiend gave her a small fused glass pendant and she said she remembers thinking she could make one herself.
So she looked on the Internet and found a simple one-day class to take on the subject. Within two months of that, she and her husband, who were living in the Bay area at the time, decided to leave California for a simpler, healthier, more affordable life in Oregon. Little did she know that her new home in Portland is also home to the three glass companies that make most of the art glass used in the country.
“I love my work. This is what I am supposed to be doing,” she said with a satisfied tone. This past January, Kruse began calling her glasswork her full-time job.
“I was a web designer and I loved that, it was a great job, but I got tired,” she explained. “I left the cube last January, and I am so glad I did.”
She said she did not even trying to sell any of her work for a year because she wanted to hone her skills and really understand the art. While she is still figuring out her strategy for marketing that work, Kruse is enjoying and appreciating the artistic community in the Portland area. She works very hard to be a part of that local community by only purchasing her supplies from local suppliers.
When asked what she likes about living in Beaverton, Kruse joyfully shared, “Well, we are glad we left the Bay area. It is a great place to live, but there is a price you pay to live there and we were finding it was no longer worth that price. Plus, I love my community now and the markets here. I was never a real city girl, so the suburbs feel nice. I grew up in the Jersey suburbs, and this is actually a lot like that area in terms of what grows here and having seasons. I feel like I moved where I belong, and that is right here.”
For more information on Kruse’s glass creations, visit the Web site www.juiceglass.com.