About Us

Cop­per Dancer Designs is the merger of two inde­pen­dent stu­dios, Art of the Fire­bird, started in 2006 by Julia Benson-Slaughter, and Four Tails Lam­p­work, started in 2007 by Andrea Winkler.

About Andrea

I have been lam­p­work­ing since sum­mer 2006. At that time I was involved in book­bind­ing, and had begun cre­at­ing scroll books with wooden frames and beaded han­dles. My sis­ter, who had been lam­p­work­ing for over a year at that point, became annoyed by my pes­ter­ing her for beads of the dimen­sions I needed. Finally, she plopped me in front of a Hot­Head torch and taught me to make my own beads. A few spac­ers is all she thought I would need to know … but I was hooked, good and proper. I am a dilet­tante, with a mul­ti­plic­ity of styles and types of glass. While I flirt with “the dark side,” mean­ing borosil­i­cate or “hard” glass, my love is the organic effects one gets with soft glass and the unpre­dictabil­ity of the com­bi­na­tion of sil­ver with the met­als in glass. I have been sell­ing my beads since 2008 – I hate let­ting them go, but it is such a plea­sure to see them go out in the world and to see the won­der­ful things peo­ple make with them! This year, pressed for time by my full time job (I teach university-level Euro­pean his­tory), I took up met­al­smithing, and now enjoy work­ing with mixed media, using glass, cop­per, brass, and even Prismacolour!

About Julia

I have been lam­p­work­ing since May, 2005, after a half-day work­shop as part of a “girls’ week­end away” showed me that you actu­ally could play with fire and glass at home. I began sell­ing my beads in March, 2007, at one of the local bead shows, when I real­ized that I really was cre­at­ing more beads than I could use myself.

Although I still work occa­sion­ally with “soft” glass, my love is borosil­i­cate, a.k.a. “hard,” glass. I am fas­ci­nated by its unpre­dictabil­ity and the wide range of color you can get from a sin­gle rod of glass, espe­cially when you com­bine it with clear glass. Since I like to work “hot and fast,” as it were, boro suits my style per­fectly. I added in the chain­maille work about two years ago, when I was look­ing for some­thing to com­bine with my beads to cre­ate unique jew­elry. Plus, chain­maille is far more portable than flame and glass, let’s face it. Dis­cov­er­ing the square wire rings that I use most often sim­ply rein­forced that choice.

About Cop­per Dancer Designs

We decided to merge in April, 2010, after doing shows together for 2 1/2 years. We both wanted to expand our local pres­ence and start doing some of the Atlanta area arts and crafts shows, but many of them do not allow inde­pen­dent artists to share a booth. We’ve had ample oppor­tu­nity to dis­cover that we work well together, and to find that each of us had strengths that the other lacked.

About Our Name

Our inspi­ra­tion for our name is the drag­on­fly, which in many cul­tures rep­re­sents new life and new begin­nings. As we both work in glass and metal, par­tic­u­larly cop­per, we searched for ways to link the drag­on­fly (and its cousin, the dam­selfly) with our art.

Drag­on­flies and dam­selflies are both mem­bers of the order Odonata. Both types of insects are often called “drag­on­flies,” though to be more pre­cise, true drag­on­flies are Anisoptera and dam­selflies, which have slightly indented, curvier wings, are Zygoptera. All are odonates, so enough with the biol­ogy les­son and distinctions!

Odonata, how­ever, seemed overly fussy as a name. A search found the dam­selfly pop­u­larly known as the “cop­pery dancer,” a Texas vari­ant found in the region around Uvalde. This is an area Andrea knows well, hav­ing grown up in south-central Texas. This beau­ti­ful pic­ture is by J. Cen­tavo… isn’t the Cop­pery Dancer lovely? Make sure you visit Mr. Centavo’s page on Flickr for some phe­nom­e­nal images of the wildlife in South Texas. Mean­while, while our designs in glass and cop­per can­not match the beauty of nature, we think that they will prove to have an ele­gance all their own.