GRAPEVINE, Texas — Twenty years ago, Nancy Doughney was sitting there watching one of those do-it-yourself shows when she got the urge to do it herself.
“I watched them make a wind chime out of glass and I thought I want to try that,” she said.
Thus began Nancy’s obsession with stained glass. Today, she’s nearly run out of room to display her creations. Her backyard is a stained glass gallery, featuring a horse, a giraffe and roughly a dozen other pieces.
Eventually, her husband, John, started doing it too. Now, virtually every night until midnight the two retired educators are in the studio creating art.
“But Nancy’s development of this now has gone to another level,” John said.
Nancy is now, arguably, one of the most talented stained glass artists anywhere. She creates realistic mosaics that, from a distance, look like detailed paintings, yet they are all made with glass.
Her pieces have been displayed and showcased around the world in places like Times Square and Europe. Not surprisingly, she gets a lot of requests from galleries that want to display her art and people who want to buy it. So, Nancy and John turned it into a business, albeit, not a very good one.
They rarely make a profit, often doing work for free or charging only for materials. They've donated a lot of their time and talent to creating stained glass art for charities.
“No, our business model is not one we would put out there for anyone to adopt,” John said.
A lot of their art is also personal like the stained glass Samantha King brought to them a couple of years back.
“She came in and I remember her coming in crying, just in tears,” John said. “And we said, ‘Tell us how we can help you.’”
“There were a lot of tears shed that day,” said King.
After her grandma’s death, King inherited a piece of her stained glass, which always caught her eye when she visited her grandma in San Angelo.
“It felt like I had a piece of her house with me and that was a piece of her,” King said.
But after a bumpy drive home, the glass pane was in pieces. She couldn’t afford the nearly $3,000 it would cost to have it fixed.
Eventually, she found John and Nancy, who put the pieces back together.
“They’re miracle workers,” King said.
John and Nancy fixed up the pane and even used the broken glass to make two angel ornaments that King can hang on her Christmas tree.
“I was just overwhelmed with emotions,” King said. “I’ll always be thankful for them.”
“It reinforced why we do it,” John said. “If it brings joy to somebody else, then why not do it.”
As John and Nancy have discovered, given the chance to do something kind, it’s always rewarding to do it yourself.