A local artist’s love of 19th-century glassblowing techniques has landed her on a Detroit television producer’s show about keeping the tradition of craftsmanship alive.

Shawn Messenger, who owns Schmidt Messenger Studios with artist and husband Jack Schmidt in Toledo’s downtown warehouse district, will appear later this month on an episode of A Craftsman’s Legacy, a show created and produced by Eric Gorges.

Messenger, 63, a native of Shaker Heights, Ohio, who came to northwest Ohio in the 1980s with her husband, a Toledo native, uses an 1800s Italian method known as murrini. The practice involves cutting through a glass rod, or cane, to reveal cross-sectioned layers of colored glass, which give a piece depth.

VIDEO: An artist’s love for glassblowing

‘“The show is about craftsmanship and the spirit of that and its importance in society,” Gorges said. “Shawn is maintaining that skill in murrini glasswork and is carrying that legacy forward. Her personal journey is pretty incredible, her belief in craftsmanship and the arts.”

After experiencing a health crisis in the late 1990s, Gorges, who worked in IT with the Xerox Corporation, was encouraged by a friend to do what he loved, working with his hands. Gorges began working as an apprentice under a master metal shaper, learning to make custom vehicles, and in 1999, he opened up his own custom bike shop, Voodoo Choppers.

This is the fourth season for A Craftsman’s Legacy. Gorges pursued his idea for a show that would tell the story of an old-world craft in each episode through hands-on participation with a noted craftsman.

For the episode with Messenger, which will first air Saturday on WGTE Public Media (channel 9/630 on Buckeye Broadband), Gorges and his crew traveled to Toledo in May and spent more than 20 hours over two days filming in her studio.

Messenger’s artwork — paperweights, vases, and other colorful pieces — becomes reality in her hot studio, where she and assistant Heather Hughes-Meek create compositions from glass. The results are small, intricate flowers with a three-dimensional quality — they seem to be growing inside their clear glass enclosures.

Glassblowing was always in the cards for Messenger. After she took an elective glass course at the Cleveland Institute of Art (she ended up getting a bachelor’s of fine arts in glass there), she never looked back.

“I kept thinking, ‘I just really want to do this.’ So I had to have other jobs [at first] to pay the bills, but I always was involved in glass in some way,” Messenger said. “I just think it’s really amazing that I get to come in every day and create something. You kind of get to dream when you are blowing glass about what it will look like, what colors. That freedom to create, not everybody has that.”

She fell into using the murrini method after a woman picked up a small murrini piece she created at a local art fair and said it looked like hollyhock was growing inside. Murrini is also known as millefiori, or a thousand flowers.

Messenger, who at this point was working with the Toledo Area Glass Guild’s hot glass art studio in the Artist Village at Toledo Botanical Garden, surrounded by perennial flower gardens, said bells went off in her head.

“When I first blew glass, I had no idea. I just sort of made things that were interesting,” Messenger said. “When she said that I thought, ‘Maybe I can do that.’ And it wasn’t hard — I had flowers all around me. I watched flowers grow all the time ... grow, change, die.”

Messenger and her husband, Jack, who is a sculptor and glassblower, started out in a studio near the Maumee Bay Brewing Company and in 2001 bought the building they are in now at 340 Morris St.

Over the years, she has created and sold her work at her studio and through the Toledo Museum of Art, the now defunct Jacobson's department store, at wholesale shows, and through an art catalog called Artful Home.

She has been on television before, including the PBS film The House that Glass Built, an episode about Toledo’s history with glass.

Messenger’s advice to those wanting to forge a career in any form of art is to keep moving forward, no matter the obstacles.

“It’s right time, right place, but if you’re not doing it, you’re not going to find that place. You’re just not,” she said.

She hopes viewers who watch the Craftsman’s Legacy episode come away with a sense of what it is like to be an artist.

“I think it’s about being a craftsman, how I live my life making pieces,” she said, “and how hard it is to do [the murrini process], because Eric did have a little bit of a hard time with it. He was good, but he did burn himself.

“He was insistent on doing the cane, and we said, ‘OK, but don’t touch it,’ and he touched it,” she said, laughing.

Contact Roberta Gedert at rgedert@theblade.com, 419-724-6075, or on Twitter @RoGedert.

First Published December 16, 2017, 6:21 p.m.