An oxygen and propane torch clamped to a workbench casts a comet’s tail of light and heat as Judith Hotchkiss picks up a blue glass rod and holds it just shy of the flame. In an instant, the glass changes, first to black, then to a red ball that glows on the end of the rod like Rudolph’s nose. As it melts, Hotchkiss turns the rod around in the flame, making the ball larger.

“It’s kind of like twirling honey on the end of a stick,” the Deer Isle artist says, starting to make what would eventually become a glass button.

With the other hand, she heats up a graphite marble mold, then swirls the ball of molten glass into one of its cups. She heats it up again and dips it into sparkly shards of aventurine glass, gold leaf and silver leaf. Then it’s back to the flame, in one hand the glowing ball of glass, still attached to the blue rod. In the other, a clear rod, slowly melting at the back of the torch. She brings the two together in a kiss, covering the metallic pieces with a layer of clear glass. Then, with a twist, she takes away the clear and swishes the whole thing around again in the marble mold.

“It doesn’t look like much now,” she says, holding up the orange-brown glowing ball.

In a few hours, it will look like a miniature globe, covered with wispy clouds of metallic glass. For now, as she separates the half-sphere from the rod and nestles a copper toggle into the flat side, she just wants to make sure the back of the button looks as neat as the front.

“They get handled,” she says. “They get picked over at shows and I like them to look good.”

She covers the toggle with dots of melted glass and smooths them over with a tool that looks like a thick paint scraper. Then she places the button in a kiln heated to 940 F, where the temperature will gradually drop for six to eight hours. This process, which makes the buttons more durable, is called annealing.

“It removes all the stress from the glass,” she explains.

While Hotchkiss’ buttons may look like tiny works of art, all shimmering swirls, slick stripes and vibrant colors, they are meant to be worn, not displayed.

“My finished product becomes part of someone else’s creation and I just really like that,” she says. “You never know where they’re going to end up.”

Some have ended up in the studio of Janice Jones, a weaver from Bradford who used glass buttons made by another artisan until she saw Hotchkiss’ designs.

“At first, it was like, ‘Oh, Judy, you’re making glass buttons,'” Jones says. “Then it was like, ‘Oh, gee, they’re great buttons.”

Hotchkiss started making buttons for her own creations. For years, she worked as a fiber artist, knitting sweaters in rich patterns and vibrant colors. She liked the idea of creating her own buttons to match or complement her designs, and tried making them from wood, horn, metal and clay before she settled on glass. She took a few classes in bead making, which uses many of the same techniques as button making, and learned how to fuse glass together in a kiln. It became a hobby, and she started displaying her own buttons on her sweaters when she traveled to fiber-arts trade shows.

“I got a lot of comments on the buttons,” she says. “Textile manufacturers asked, ‘Where did you get those buttons?'”

Around that time, orders for her knitting started picking up. After a while, she got so busy knitting that it started to feel less like a creative endeavor and more like a chore.

“I got to the point where I was doing so much production with the sweaters that it wasn’t fun anymore,” she says. “I started to phase out of it and started to work on the buttons.”

That was five years ago. Since then, she has taken classes at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, Horizons craft school in Massachusetts, and a little closer to home at Haystack School of Crafts in Deer Isle. She has studied glass bead making with artists Sally Prasch, Kristina Logan and Loren Stump. At one school, Hotchkiss says, the teacher thought it was funny that people would be using the buttons. He thought they should be on display in a case, rather than on someone’s sweater.

But Hotchkiss pressed on, creating wearable art and enjoying herself in the process. She created a studio in the barn of her farmhouse, with several large work counters, an area to store big sheets of art glass, and a workbench with PVC pipes underneath, where she stores glass rods. She doesn’t work on the buttons full time, but she does work on them whenever she has time. In the winter, it gets cold in there, so she doesn’t work on them as often.

Hotchkiss was trained as a chef and works in a local restaurant so she doesn’t have to rely solely on her button making to get by. That way, it still feels like a hobby to her – when she sits down at the torch and starts melting glass, hours slip by without her noticing.

“When I did knitting, I only did knitting,” Hotchkiss says. “Right now [the buttons are] still really fun. I haven’t launched into turning it into a supporting-me kind of business.”

In addition to the buttons she creates with the torch, Hotchkiss makes fused buttons. She places layers of glass on top of one another – say, a square piece of black glass with a small metallic (called dichroic) fleck in the middle and a piece of clear glass on top – and melts them together in a kiln so they form a soft-edged, shiny sandwich. Sometimes, she adds bits of screening or stripes of thin glass rods to the mix. Often, if she has shards left over, she’ll throw them all together and see what happens. Sometimes it turns out really cool, sometimes, it doesn’t.

“I don’t know anyone else who does that,” she says, laughing. “I’m just a Yankee who can’t throw stuff away.”

She spends a lot of time making components for her buttons, mixing colors by melting two or more different colored glass rods together, or creating millefiori-style bits. These are minuscule chips of glass that hold intricate designs, such as a quilt square, a heart or a face. This is time-consuming and difficult, but it’s something Hotchkiss loves doing.

And whether she’s daubing a blue half-sphere of molten glass into shards of silver leaf or fusing together a silver screen and a layer of shimmery pink glass, her designs are always striking.

“One of the things I love about them is the colors she uses,” Jones says. “She has some great colors and some great color combinations and she has some unique shapes, which are kind of neat.”

If they can’t find something from Hotchkiss’ collection of buttons, knitters sometimes will ask her to create something to match a certain shade of yarn or a pattern. Or, they’ll pick up a few buttons and design a piece around them.

“I mostly have her fused glass buttons, but I have a few of her round ones because they’re just so nice,” Jones said. “I haven’t figured out what I’m going to use them on yet.”

For now, Hotchkiss is glad to inspire other people’s fiber designs rather than focus on her own. While she still knits every once in a while, she plans to stick with button making for the sheer joy of it.

“The colors are there – everything I worked with with the fiber,” she said. “I just loved it from the first day. It really mesmerized me.”

Judith Hotchkiss Designs can be reached at 348-5671 or online at www.glassbuttons.com