Framingham's Most Famous Glass Artist Is Blowing Up

FRAMINGHAM, MA — Before lighting the torch, Momoko Schafer issues a breezy warning to a reporter: the flame can reach temperatures upward of 6,000 degrees, so make sure not to walk directly in front of it.

With that said, Schafer turns on the small but mighty torch, dons safety glasses, and gets to work heating up the bulbous end of a long tube of glass. Painstakingly, she shapes material into a colorful spotted button that she will later attach to a larger glass sculpture of a mushroom.

From her workspace in an old Framingham mill, Schafer is running a one-woman glass-making enterprise. Schafer, 25, has only been working with glass since her teens, but her profile exploded this summer when she appeared in the Netflix reality show "Blown Away."

Her Instagram followers shot from 150 to over 17,000, and with it a rise in people buying her work. The show also helped her connect with other glass artists — she has a demo coming up with renowned glass artist Deborah Czeresko, who also appeared on "Blown Away."

Schafer's journey to becoming an in-demand glass artist started when she was young. She was always artistic, and started out working with ceramics, but didn't discover glass until a trip to Japan when she was a teenager.

"I was just looking for the material that grabbed me," she said.

She attended the Massachusetts College of Art and Design after graduating from Natick High School. MassArt is one of the few colleges that offers a glass major, and she took advantage of the relatively cheap in-state tuition and low studio fees, and its glass furnace. She would sometimes spend as much as 18 hours a day in the studio working on fundamentals and developing ideas.

From her Framingham studio, Schafer creates smaller glass shapes using a technique called lampwork. It's a style of glassblowing associated with marijuana paraphernalia. But the medium allows Schafer to create beautifully intricate glass shapes and figures.

Right now, she's working on a sculpture meant to resemble a paintbrush stroke, with swirls of black glass that look almost too delicate to exist. She's made tiny hands, fairy tale mushrooms, and Japanese Daruma dolls.

But Schafer primarily workers with kiln glass — the style of glassblowing most people recognize, where artists shape molten blobs of glass in front of a roaring furnace. Schafer's kiln pieces are also intricate. In the second episode of "Blown Away," she creates a Bento box shape full of caviar, rice, and mushrooms.

"Blown Away" follows the reality-TV format: a host challenges a group of glassblowers with a set theme. The bulk of the episode follows the artists as they labor. They curse, argue, and sweat as they work against the clock. At the end, a panel of judges reviews their work. One artist is crowned winner of the episode, one is sent home for good.

Her appearance on the show wasn't certain. A casting director kept emailing her, but she brushed it off. It wasn't until the director reached out in a personal Instagram message that Schafer started to really consider the show.

"I'm definitely not putting myself out there like that," she said, describing her thinking when she was first contacted.

She ended up being part of a pretty unique reality show.

Watching an artist shape a piece of molten glass dangling from the end of a metal pipe is surprisingly nerve-wracking. And watching an artist try to execute a concept (or fail to) with such a delicate art form can be very dramatic. In the third episode, one judge questions Schafer about her choice in colors, and asks if one piece of her work is "necessary" — and Schafer bristles under the criticism

No spoilers here, but Schafer does make it far into the season, outlasting glass-blowers who have more experience. That was one goal she set for herself.

"I knew five years [of experience] in the glass world was baby steps. I just didn't want to be the first one eliminated," she said.

Back in Framingham (she does her kiln work at a studio in Cambridge), Schafer is working countless hours. She's of course working on her own glass creations, but she also takes commissions for everything from wedding gifts to trophies. But on top of that, she's applying for grants, running multiple social media accounts and an online store, and keeping up with the art scene.

She's not quite sure what's next, although she wants to travel as much as possible to see what other glass artists are doing in places like Seattle and North Carolina.

"I'm constantly traveling in or order for me to learn and get better," she said.