For Lisa and Delbert Dowdy, their Wake Village home life is not typical.

The family garage? It’s a workroom where they create their art.

And for the Dowdys, their respective crafts are a hands-on love affair. Lisa is a lampwork bead artist, while Delbert is a woodturner.

Lisa traces her artistic calling to her mom, who trained her eye to look for beauty.

“My mother is an artist, Joyce Ward, and she just instilled in all of her children to notice detail and color. We would drive 15 miles to get the best vantage point on the sunset, or the blue in snow—it’s not just white, there’s blue too.”

Though she learned lampwork beading four years ago, that wasn’t her first foray into craftwork.

“I’ve always either cut or painted or sewed or just noticed how things go together. I guess if it was summed up in one sentence, my desire to create is stronger than my fear of failing,” Lisa said.

Right before she started lampworking, she did stained glass.

When people ask how she did things, she said, “One foot in front of the other.”

It’s that same idea that inspired her to take up lampworking, which has strong roots extending to 14th century Murano, Italy.

“That comes back from when they used to use little alcohol lamps to actually work the glass,” Delbert said about the name of the craft.

Lisa was in a rock shop when a few rods of glass caught her eye. She started collecting glass and tried her hand at the intricate work, teaching herself as she went along. Delbert, who teaches physical science at Texarkana College, has a chemistry background and helped her get set up.

In lampwork, a torch is used to soften the glass rods, smaller or larger beads being created in the process.

“It gets to be the consistency of honey or somewhere in between. You can bend it, twist it. It’s mesmerizing,” Lisa said.

“I dreamed about it. I would look forward to going to sleep ...” she said.

She keeps a sketch pad to store her bead ideas, and has learned jewelry making in the process.

“Because I ended up with just boxes of beads, I had to learn jewelry work,” Lisa said.

It was a new feeling, she said, to do something for herself but also find that it appeals to others.

“It was kind of surprising to me at first. It got a lot of attention and people like it,” said Lisa.

In the garage that sits just off the family kitchen and a side room, she huddles beside the flame shooting from a torch.

The glass is heated, and all the while she’s keeping her eye on it, as well as the color and glow coming from the rod as it turns in the flame. She wants to keep it all even so the forming beads don’t become mishapen.

(On the way to the workroom, Lisa quipped that it had been five or six years since a car has fit inside the garage.)

For some beads, though, she doesn’t want them uniform. As an example, Lisa pointed to a group of her beads assembled on the kitchen counter, one of them with little bumps on it.

“The little bumps that you had noticed are just sections of glass where I had touched it on the bead, and if I had left it in the torch it would have reached a high enough temperature that it would have been smooth just like the rest of the bead,” she said. “I like texture and dimension. It’s just a personal preference.”

After the beads are ready to solidify in shape, fiber blankets allow them to cool.

There are things to monitor while heating glass. For example, if you heat the rod too fast it’ll pop off.

“I’ve smelled my clothes burning before and didn’t know where it was. You find out real fast,” remarked Lisa, an elementary school teacher.

Stringers of melted glass can be used to decorate the beads, adding details like dots. There’s glass that looks like metal or glass that’s a different color on the outside than it is on in the inside.

“After (the beads) cool off in the blanket, then you put them in a kiln and that’s kind of like a massage for the glass, and it will allow the glass to not break later on,” she said.

And back to chemistry, it’s important to know the coefficient of thermal expansion for each color of glass so they work together and don’t cause undue stress and crack. And you don’t want it to break, Lisa says, because each piece of lampworking is an extension of yourself.

Her work with beads inspired interests in fused and sandblasted glass work, as well as silversmithing. (Her Christmas presents? “A regulator, a torch and sand,” said Delbert with a laugh.)

“What I like as much as anything is that you can personalize things so much. It’s just up to your imagination,” said Lisa.

It’s Delbert who uses the lathe in the workroom rather than the fire. Part of his woodworking process, though, is similar to the beads and jewelry in that it sees pieces come together for the whole.

One of his creations looks like one piece but is constructed from sections that fit together perfectly.

“Most of the work that I do is called segmented work, and what that means is that if you look you can see the individual little pieces of wood,” Delbert said.

“What that allows you to do is then put different colors of wood,” he continued. “Woodturning is a lot about shapes.”

Pointing to one project, he said, “What we’re doing here is just getting the shape into the wood. But to be able to go beyond just a piece of wood and trying to find a piece of wood that has a nice beautiful pattern or grain in it and then put a nice shape in that, to be able to go into segmented work now means that I’m not limited by the shape of the piece of wood I start with.

“Because now I can make rings of lots of different sizes—as big as my lathe will allow. The other thing is now I can combine different colors. So not only am I getting shape, but also I’ve got the design in the wood and I’ve got different colors. And then I’ve gone beyond that a little bit in that I have started using woodburning and also what is called piercing.”

That’s where you create a kind of “negative space” and use patterns in the overall piece. He’s also taken his wood and created basketweave patterns.

These days Delbert, who’s done woodturning seriously for eight or nine years, doesn’t have a lot of work in his shop after selling his creations during the holidays. His work is sold at a gallery in northern Arkansas.

“I do a lot with the local club,” he said about working with the SouthWest Association of Turners, for whom he does local demonstrations. For him, seeing other people’s work can be an inspiration.

“Woodturners, usually we look to potters because potters have been working with shapes,” he said. “One of the things that woodturners hopefully, eventually come to is the idea that no matter how beautiful the wood is, no matter how beautiful the design or what you do with it, if the shape is not really there it’s ugly.”

He puts it this way: Potters have been working with shapes for thousands of years. And as with pottery, it’s a precise art. He takes out one piece and points out how the base should be just a little rounder.

“Shape becomes a fine art ... and by actually rounding that bottom just a little bit more the idea is that you want to be able to look at a piece and not see it hit the table. You want it to look as if it’s floating off, and you do that by shape,” said Delbert, who said a majority of woodworkers seem to have some sort of technical background.

“One fortunate effect of having pursued what we’ve each pursued is that we both know where it’s come from. It’s just that we’ve been blessed and it’s a gift from God,” Lisa said.

And for gifts, raising funds or other causes, they’ve found ways to share that gift.

“It’s a small way for us to be able to donate something to where they can raise funds for things,” said Lisa about using their art to help others.

They’ve passed on this eye for the arts to their children, Michael and Jacob, as well, urging them to find their own passion.

“Just to keep their eyes open that there might be something that really inspires them that they love, have a passion for, and that they can also make money doing or just participate in,” said Lisa.

For the Dowdys, appreciating the world with an artistic eye is truly a part of the family.