When Elliot first started working in the glass arts, beads like this were her primary product. But she has since moved on to sculpture, creating wall pieces of leaves, flowers and branches rendered in delicate glass. Such a piece recently won Elliot a student award in the sculptural glass category from NICHE magazine, a trade publication for craft retailers. Similar awards were bestowed upon only 18 other students nationwide. Elliot says she hopes the award will bring a higher profile that she can use to expand her glass bead business to include her larger pieces, one of which she donated to the upcoming Great Glass Auction on April 2.

But when a bead with one flower takes five minutes to create, her plans will undoubtedly mean many more hours spent in her makeshift studio. While holding up one sculptural piece--a speckled glass branch supporting soft pink seed pods--Elliot says, "This is crazy hard to do."

It's a skill that Elliot has developed over a number of years. Her bead business began about five years ago after a friend introduced her to the art of glass blowing. It piqued her artistic sensibilities. "He was a scientific glass blower, so he was doing things like beakers and test tubes," she says. "Since I was a kid, I've made things. I ended up buying a book on glass beads and just trying to imitate what I saw. Even now, I still feel experimental."

She augmented her self-taught skills with studio art classes, starting with classes at San José State University, and worked up to a series of workshops at the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle.

Dale Chiluly, an internationally known glass artist who created the works that hang in the lobby of the San Jose Museum of Art, runs the school. Elliot says he is her greatest inspiration. "He's elevating glass into an art," she says.

For three weeks each summer over three sequential years, Elliot immersed herself in the glass arts at Chiluly's school. At first, she learned the more famous art of offhand glass blowing, which is shaping molten glass by blowing into it through a tube.

In her third year at the school, Elliot took a class in flameworking, which is the same method she uses today. Instead of blowing air into glass to shape it after it comes out of the fire, flameworking involves rolling and reshaping glass while it's still in the heat of a torch.

"This is the easiest way to 'blow' glass," she says. "It was great to focus on it like that--three weeks of working from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. every day. I really learned how to do it."

At that point, Elliot was working in the semiconductor industry as a specialist in organizational development and training. Prior to that, she had worked in a more creative field as a hairstylist and makeup artist. But when she made her second career move to pursue her glass art full time, the commitment was serious.

Her second husband gave her the push she needed to quit her job--by laying tile in the dining room and building her a workspace. His successful business, a start-up company in the semiconductor industry, allows her to work on her glass full time. But with five children, Elliot says her home studio also allows her the freedom to step back and take care of her family.

Her three children are 17, 13 and 7, and her husband's two children are 13 and 14. All attend private schools in the area.

Elliot also keeps up with her education; she's attending De Anza College for art history classes. And within the past few months, she's branched out into the more sculptural realm of glass art in her studio, where she says each piece requires about 20 hours to complete.

Instead of introducing new elements by combining two colors of heated glass, which is her technique in bead making, Elliot keeps a variety of colored powders on hand. When shaping a branch out of molten material, she rolls the softened cylinder in the powders to produce a realistic textured effect. Her muses--plant life of diverse colors and sizes--are bottled in clear glass on a shelf in her studio, ready to be imitated when need be. One jar contains the seedpods that prompted her current work.

"One of my favorite things to do is walking," Elliot says, adding that she enjoys areas like Rancho San Antonio for their various artistic inspirations. "I come back with at least one thing every time. I wonder how I can make something that looks like it in glass."

Her ability to do just that has impressed a number of her collaborators. One of those people is Keay Edwards, a photographer who has taken studio shots of many artists' work for the Bay Area Glass Institute, a nonprofit organization that provides classes and studio space for glass artists, including Elliot. Even with the number of artists he's seen, Edwards says her glass pieces are unique.

"I haven't seen much else like it. It's really remarkable work," Edwards says. "She just came out of nowhere, but she's on a good upward arc now."

Elliot's jewelry sold mostly via word-of-mouth, so she decided to apply for the NICHE award to help her raise her profile in the sculpture world--while the seedpod piece is one of a three-part work that she hopes to sell for $10,000, none of her sculpture has sold yet. She says that one day, she hopes to have a glass design business going with a team to help her.

While she's not there yet, Elliot recently installed some of her sculpture in galleries like the 1212 Contemporary Fine Art Gallery in Burlingame and the Glass Gallery in Santa Cruz. The NICHE website also featured her glass sculpture work, and since then, Elliot has received inquiries from a gallery in Chicago.

Daniel Waldman with the NICHE awards says that the trade magazine received about 1,000 entries for the competition. In Elliot's category, glass sculptural, she was one of five finalists. "Hers was the most innovative and the most professional," Waldman says, adding that many of Elliot's competitors in the student category were young artists working out of larger collegiate programs.

"One of the interesting things is that her school is a community college. Those schools aren't frequently recognized for their great art programs," he says.

Finalists were notified in December, and the award winners were announced at the Philadelphia Buyers Market of American Craft on Feb. 20. That inquiry from Chicago is the only interest Elliot has seen so far from outside the Bay Area glass community, which she says has a number of outlets for new glass artists, such as the Glass Alliance of Northern California. She edits the newsletter and sits on the board of that group.

Elliot has also worked extensively with the Bay Area Glass Institute, donating works for auctions that benefit the nonprofit group.

"We have these little pockets of glass artists all over the Bay Area," Elliot says. "There's a place in San Francisco, and San José State teaches it. There are groups in Benicia and Berkeley, too."

Chris Moore, operations manager for the Bay Area Glass Institute, says Elliot has been a great help to their organization. Elliot has donated works to their auctions for years--while in the past, she's donated her glass beads and jewelry, this year, she's given up the complex sculpture piece that won the NICHE award.

"She donated what I'll admit is my favorite piece in the auction, and since those pieces take so long [to make], she's being very generous with her time," Moore says. The fourth annual Great Glass Auction takes place April 2 at Hotel Valencia at San Jose's Santana Row, which isn't a long car ride for Elliot.

After all, local interest makes for an easier market for transporting her works. But as national interest in her work grows, she's tweaking the ways to ship her glass pieces safely, which could be an artistic breakthrough itself. "I have to use an art shipper," she says. "You just pack them like babies."

For more information on the Bay Area Glass Institute and the fourth annual Great Glass Auction, visit www.bagi.org.