Mandrel & Frit is a two bench glass studio in a converted adobe garage on the north edge of Taos, New Mexico, run by Marisol Carrasco, who spent twelve years blowing laboratory glassware for a university chemistry department before she opened it. She winds each bead from rods of soft glass onto a steel mandrel over a bench torch, rolls crushed glass frit into the surface for colour, anneals every batch overnight in a small kiln, and strings the finished beads on waxed Irish linen.
Who this theme is for
A small studio that makes jewelry with its own hands and a flame: lampwork beads, fused glass pendants, enamel earrings, wire wrapped stones. The buyers want to know the piece was made by one person and that no two are the same, so the page opens on the strand draped over sandstone, comes in close enough to see the swirls and the air caught inside the glass, then shows the bead turning on the mandrel in the torch. The Conscious layout sets the photo beside a serif heading with wide outlined buttons, which gives a handful of small, bright objects room on a pale page.
What was decided in the brief
The style is Conscious on its second variant. The primary is a deep juniper green like the trees on the mesa outside the studio, the background is a warm pale cream close to the adobe plaster, and the accent is a saturated gold like the flame at the tip of the torch, so the buy button reads as heat against the cool glass. The brand facts lead with the torch and the overnight anneal because buyers of handmade glass ask whether it will crack, and the knotted linen goes into the facts because a broken cord is the most common repair a bead necklace needs.