STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Dru Shoemaker Scandinaro creates magical art by melting glass.

It’s called fused glass art. And, when she’s done, she has a beautiful handcrafted glass bowl in myriad of colors and patterns or a three-dimensional wall or coffee table picture.

There is, for instance, a fused glass piece in which you can look through a stand of aspen to see Bald Mountain under the moonlight in the background. Another piece features a window opening into onto a sagebrush field with Baldy in the background.

The Sun Valley artist’s works can be found at the Art Museum of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls, Saddletree Gallery Art in Ketchum and the Friedman Memorial Airport in Hailey. And she will have works for sale for the first time Friday through Sunday, July 11-13, at the Ketchum Arts Festival in Sun Valley’s Champions’ Meadow.

“I enjoy doing this so much that there are a lot of days I don’t get out of my house,” Shoemaker Scandinaro said. “I’m focused, trying to create something new and different. And I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes. Sometimes, mistakes take you down a more interesting road.

The work begins in a studio inside Shoemaker Scandinaro’s house in Lane Ranch where she has stacks of Bullseye glass and cans full of glass straws ranging in diameter from the size of pick-up sticks to larger diameter straws.

She places pieces of glass on top of one another, painting them as needed with Rogue enamel paint. Then she takes them to her studio in the garage where she has two kilns as well as an all-important diamond cutter and sander.

There, she places her glass art in a kiln and heats them until they fuse together in a single piece. Typically, her multi-layered glass paintings have as many as nine layers, the final firing taking 50 hours.

Shoemaker Scandinaro started creating art using a kiln 30 years ago while living in Illinois. She created ornamental tiles, then a hand-painted kitchen sink.

She became interested in fused glass art three years ago after a famed Chico, Calif., blown glass artist Rick Satava, known for his Jellyfish in glass, came to her house for dinner and turned her onto the world of fused glass art.

“I’m pretty much self-taught,” she said.

Much of what Shoemaker Scandinaro creates is based on the nature she sees around her in the Sun Valley area, particularly aspen trees.

“In winter I’m constantly taking pictures of aspen. They’re beautiful in winter and summer,” she said.

She recently finished a piece of a skier on Baldy that she spent 50 hours on from start to finish.

“Each layer you need to coat three time for it to be opaque. They you fire it over and over once each layer is done,” she said.

Shoemaker Scandinaro has donated many pieces to charity and given dozens more as gifts. But, still, her inventory has begun stacking up, which led to her to enter her pieces in the Ketchum Arts Festival.

“I need to make room so I can create more!” she said.