Sag Harbor - As I stepped through the doors at Megna Glass, in Sag Harbor last Tuesday, I instantly knew I was about to witness something special. Opened in 1999 by Martin Megna and his wife Mariann, Megna Glass exists as a unique entity, producing a stunning array of custom handmade glass cabinet fixtures, lighting fixtures, chandeliers, ornaments and just about anything their clients can imagine.

Martin Megna working a piece of glass that will become a flame in a piece commissioned by Mohegan Sun as his assistant Jason Green adds air from the other end of the pipe.

Tucked away at the far side of the back parking lot behind BookHampton in Sag Harbor, the building is divided into two sections, one, which contains the retail space displaying examples of the different, handmade glass products they produce, and the other contains Martin Megna's glassblowing workshop, which sits in contrast to the colorfully adorned showroom. When I arrived, I was greeted with a blast of hot air one would expect to fill a workshop that contains two furnaces (one which keeps the glass molten at a scorching 2,000 degrees and an annealing oven kept at a much tamer 890 degrees Fahrenheit.

Megna was sitting on his work bench, intently focused on drawing out a piece of orange hot glass into something that resembled a lightbulb as seen through the eyes of Salvador Dali extruding from the end of a metal pipe that he kept in constant motion by rolling it back and forth, occasionally calling for his apprentice, Jason Green to blow into the pipe's other end, as Megna pulled on the molten end with a pair of shears. It turned out that the piece he was making was part of a sample set Megna Glass is preparing for a series of installations for the Mohegan Sun Casino.

"It starts out with acorns and corncob husks and then it turns into flames. It's called "Campfire Stories" and there are eight panels total that will go in the entrance to the Casino of the Earth," said Megna describing the piece for which he was currently making the samples for. "They're roughly 10 feet high by five feet wide. We just got offered the job yesterday so right now we're making samples to bring to the Rockwell Group in New York for approval. This one piece is probably about four weeks work, because we're only doing about 13 flames, 12 corn husks and 12 acorns, but then they might want more depending on the design."

The whole process, whether the glass will be blown, molded, or pressed begins in the crucible, which contains 150 pounds of molten glass kept at a toasty 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.

This new set of work isn't the first thing that Megna has done for Mohegan Sun. "We did a glass beaded curtain for them already that is 18 feet wide, 100 feet wide in six different panels with about 500 beads per square foot but what we like about it is the design has meaning to them; it's their trail of life and it has the symbolic crests of the chiefs, it all tells a story," explained Mariann. "Martin is good when people say 'can you make this?' He can just do it because he has so many antique molds here that he can do just about anything, casting, blowing, fusing and all the stuff he's done over 30 years of glass work. He's a good one for them to tap into."

Megna got started blowing glass at a young age. "I started melting Coca-Cola bottles at 12 on up at Camp St. Regis" said Megna. "I'd push the bottles into the campfire until they got flat and I used ceramic kilns and hang the bottles from wire from the top of the kiln and let them droop down into long neck vases."

This time of year, Megna Glass makes hundreds of handmade glass ornaments like this seashell fresh from the casting mold, for customers looking for something different in time for the holidays.

For the uninitiated, blowing glass, whether the piece is functional, like a door knob, or ornamental is nothing shy of an art form that also requires an almost alchemical acumen. "People think you can just sit down and blow it out as big as you want it to be but it's a slow process and you can get very impatient with it," explained Mariann. "Sometimes the glass tells you what to do, but when you get to over 10 years of working with it, you start to work together with the glass. I still have Marty's first bubble that he blew when he was studying at Urban Glass in Brooklyn. It's really quite an accomplishment. You either blow through it if it's too hot, or the surface gets too hard and you can't get the bubble."

"Before we moved out here from Long Beach I was in the restaurant business cooking," said Mariann. "It was a good transition because I don't mind the heat. If you're a good cook you'd probably be a good glass blower because it's all about timing. If you're sautéing something, it's all getting it off the stove and on to the plate at the right time," she explained. "Glass blowing is the same way because you have a limited amount of time to work with the glass before it shatters, it's either too hot or too cold and it's got to be the right temperature to work it."

One of the benches Megna makes with pieces of glass made in his antique glass press.

Working alongside Megna as he learns the craft himself, Green seconds Mariann's sentiments, explaining it is certainly not as easy as it looks and while Megna makes glassblowing seem effortless, in reality it is far from. "I just started actually blowing the glass," said Green. "It's taken me two years to gather and learn a lot before you can start blowing bubbles. I had to first learn how to gather the right amount of glass out of the furnace because you want that perfect amount of glass before you blow into it."

"This is really a craft you learn by doing," added Mariann. "Jason and Martin work really well together, he's really learned a lot in the past two years. He's a natural."

Megna demonstrating another method of shaping glass; sand casting. The mold to his left is one of many he uses to make ornaments and various other shapes.

The process beings in the crucible, where 150 pounds of molten glass sit at 2,000 degrees until it is deftly scooped out on the end of a pipe and brought to a metal bench, where the glass, which at this point has the consistency of honey, is rolled into a cylinder. At that point, color can be added by rolling the still molten glass in frit, a granulated coloring agent made from different elements and a starter bubble is blown. Once the frit is added, the molten glass goes into a separate furnace to melt the frit into the surface of the glass. "I did a starter bubble after I put the frit on it and then I put more clear glass on it to get it bigger in order to pull it out and encase the color," said Megna while explaining the process. After the second coat of glass is added, Megna went to work rolling and shaping the glass with a variety of tools, picks, shears and cups.

When the glass is the shape he wants it, Megna drips a bead of water on the piece to shock the glass where he wants to separate it from the pipe, then after placing the piece gently in the annealing oven, a slight tap on the pipe separates the piece.

"We put it in the annealer at 890 degrees to take the stress out of the glass and that's the specific temperature needed to equalize the atoms that are still moving around and trying to escape," explains Megna. "Then over the course of about 15 hours we slowly bring it down to room temperature but if we're doing really thick pieces sometimes it takes a week to anneal but smaller items like beads can come out after an hour or two."

The flame for the Mohegan Sun installation after it has been fully blown and extruded and is ready to be placed in the annealer.

This is of course just one way that Megna Glass produces glass objects, as they also do mold blowing. "Marty traveled all over the country to get these antique glass molds; they're heavy, brass molds that they don't make anymore. You blow a bubble into it to get the impression on the surface of the glass and then you just pull it out."

There is also an antique glass press that Megna tracked down and reassembled, which he uses to press the glass into thick slabs. "We also work with solid glass and press it in this old prism press that used to make the prisms used in the sidewalks in New York to let light down into the subway stations," he explained. Now we're pretty much using it to make benches and tables that we put little LED's in to light up each square and I place things like seashells and beach glass into the molds so they show in the concrete.

Megna also plans on incorporating the slabs in some of the work that he hopes to do for some projects in New York City, including one at Penn Station and another for a pedestrian walkway over the Westside highway as party of the Hudson Yards project. "I was going to do a pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway for the Hudson Yards project, but it just got postponed another year," he said. "The footprints of people walking over the tiles would look like a moving sculpture to the people below."

Now that the weather is beginning to get cooler and spending time in the workshop becomes more bearable, Megna Glass is getting ready to start ramping up production on several concurrent projects as well as their commissioned works including custom glass ornaments in time for the holidays. "You can always tell a hand blown ornament because it has a glass hook at the top," said Megna as he then took a dollop of molten glass and dabbed it on the top of the ornament, stretching it out and curling it over in a loop to make the hook. "We make hundreds of these this time of year."