The more complicated the lighting project, the happier Laura Murdoch is, but the local glassblower has come to see that small and speedy can be beautiful too.

Laura Murdoch loves glass. She specifically loves glass with light glowing behind it. According to her Web site ( www.murdochglass.com ), the award-winning glasssmith doesn't go 30 minutes without thinking about the different things she can do with a blowpipe and a sandblaster. But when she sat down recently in her well-lit Gastown loft to talk about the art of turning brightly coloured molten glass into functional and decorative pendant lighting, she was quick to point out that her life's work is not an all-consuming fixation.

"It's not like I'm obsessively thinking about it all day long," says Murdoch. "It's just passing thoughts throughout the day about colours or I'll see a little design in a doorway. I keep a little sketchbook so I can write down my ideas. But it's not an all-day-long, every day kind of thing."

After trying her hand at acting and various other disciplines for 15 years, the Vancouver-based artisan discovered her passion for all things glass. That was in 1997. She's been training ever since.

"It's just a good fit for me," says Murdoch, who says she probably has about 20 pieces on the go at any given time. "I love the heat and the speed of the process. I love the fact that you've got this hot blob of liquid on the end of your pipe and it's probably not behaving quite the way you want it to and you just have to think so fast and you have to completely focus on it–you just get tunnel vision because you can't think about anything else."

It didn't come naturally. Despite studying with an expert team of supportive mentors at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington state, she felt she wasn't getting enough opportunities to hone her craft.

"I just really sucked at it in the beginning," she says. "I thought I'd never get better. I was very discouraged. So I decided to go away to Red Deer College and blow glass every day for a month to see if that would get me over the hump. And it did."

She may be better, but she's no faster. She admits some pieces take up to 100 hours of labour-intensive work.

"I don't tend to be all that interested in stuff that I can do right away," she says. "The more complicated it is, the more interested in the process I am. I do some of these [pieces] where I'll make a bubble, cool it down, sandblast it, get more glass, and then sandblast another design, and it will just go and on and on like that. One piece might stretch out over a year."

Which is exactly what she did with the Heliotrope Bouquet ($2,500), a magenta bowl chandelier with a sandblasted seashell underlay pattern. Suspended from a wrought-iron chain, this elaborate (not to mention substantially sized) light wasn't made with small spaces in mind.

"Obviously if you have an eight-foot ceiling, you can't hang it over the dining-room table or you'll be looking down into the bowl," she says. "I see it going in a stairwell or if you do have tall ceilings, you can hang it anywhere you want a little bit of mood lighting or a hit of colour."

Some of her more practical works include her amber cylinder lights, which look great in sets of three ($3,500 for the trio) hanging over kitchen islands or bars. Since the three Moroccan-style patterns are virtually identical and the shape somewhat easier to mould, Murdoch doesn't have to put in the full 100 hours on these sets (which can be sold separately for $700 to $1,500 depending on the size). And then there are her small tangerine-on-pink cone lights ($500), which work well hanging in narrow corridors and over small counter spaces. Much to Murdoch's delight, she completed the one displayed in her condo in record time.

"To blow a piece and be done in less than an hour and put it up and have it finished was just a new concept for me," says Murdoch, whose work can be found at New-Small & Sterling Glass Gallery (1440 Old Bridge Street, on Granville Island) and ordered through her site. "It really opened my eyes."

So for the purposes of cracking the home-décor market, Murdoch is considering speeding up her process.

"I think I might have to be more practical, but I don't ever want to give up working on something just because I have to," she says. "I discover so many things as I make my really labour-intensive pieces. There are lots of surprises and lots of happy accidents."