After forty-one years I am closing my workshop
“After forty-one years I am closing my workshop” – Donna Boehm (68) is selling her last Halloween lamps at a special price. Her most popular design is retiring with her.
In a small workshop in Vermont, Donna Boehm spent almost four decades building stained-glass lamps – every one of them finished by hand, every one a small piece of glasswork. Now the 68-year-old is ending her working life – and saying goodbye with her biggest success: the Emberpane®. Why is this small glowing thing suddenly so sought after? Because this is the last time it will ever be offered.
Donna Boehm (68) in her workshop in Bennington, Vermont. After forty-one years she is closing her life’s work.
Bennington, Vermont, September. The small workshop smells of flux, warm metal and cold concrete. Finished lamps sit along the shelves – some still bare, others already glowing, amber and red behind their black lead lines. On the big work table stand half-assembled Halloween lamps, and beside them pliers, patterns and small LED modules. Donna Boehm leans over one of her last pieces, the way she has done since 1985. But this year is different. It is her last autumn.
“I am sixty-eight,” she says quietly. “My eyes do not do what they used to. The centre goes first, and for a glass worker that is the part you work with.” She turns the shade a quarter and holds it to the light. “But that is not the only reason. The world changed. Almost nobody pays for real handwork anymore. Everything comes out of a factory now. My way of working is disappearing.”
Forty-one years, more than 19,000 lamps – a life spent putting light through glass
Donna has done the arithmetic. In forty-one years she has designed, assembled and hand-finished more than 19,000 lamps. Every single one passed through her hands.
“In the beginning it was church windows,” she says. “I learned the trade in 1983 from a Swiss glazier named Emil Brauer, and I rebuilt one hundred and ninety windows in sixty congregations before I was done. Then people started asking for something smaller. Something they could keep in the house. That is where the lamps came from.”
“You are not fixing a window. You are fixing the light that comes through it.”
Emil Brauer to Donna Boehm, Bennington, 1983
The Halloween lamp came last, and it became the one everybody wanted. The pattern is not invented. Donna took it off an 1897 hall transom she rebuilt on Monument Avenue in 1998 – a bat, a pumpkin and a ghost already worked into the leading by whoever built the original. She had her own drawing of it scanned rather than redrawn.
“Redraw it and it comes back looking like a sticker,” she says. “I did not want a picture of the window. I wanted the window.”
Every line sits exactly where it should – after forty-one years Donna knows every step in her sleep.
What makes Donna’s Halloween lamps different
Switched on in a dark room: each field of glass lights separately behind the raised black lines. That is the whole difference between glass and a printed shade.
What makes her lamps special is not only the face on the pumpkin. It is the three-layer build, a way of working Donna picked up from an old church glazier and refined over four decades – a traditional method almost nobody bothers with anymore.
The Three-Layer Build: Underneath sits the coloured glass panel itself, amber, red and orange, deep enough that the colour still holds when it is lit from inside. On top of that goes the raised lead-line lattice – the black grid that separates every field of colour, the way lead came separates a church window. Last, the details are worked by hand: the bat’s wing, the ghost, the ribbing on the pumpkin, the patina on the base. Inside sits a warm-white LED on a USB feed. That combination is why the lamp glows like a window instead of like a plastic shade with a picture printed on it – and why the colour does not go to mud the second you switch it on, which is what happens to most seasonal lamps.
“People underestimate how much of stained glass is arithmetic. The width of the black line against the size of the coloured field decides whether a piece reads from across a room or across a street. Get that ratio wrong and it turns to mud the moment you light it. Boehm spent four decades getting it right on windows eleven feet tall. On something eight inches tall it is not a hard problem for her.”
Dana Whitcomb, conservator, New England Glass Trades Association
“I have customers whose lamps have been in the same window for eighteen years”
Donna pulls an old wooden box out from under the bench. Inside are hundreds of letters and cards. “Thank-you notes from customers. Some of them have been writing to me for decades,” she says. She takes one out, dated 2008. It reads: “Dear Mrs Boehm, your lamp has been in our front window every October for years now. It still looks exactly as it did on the first evening.”
There is a simple reason for that: quality instead of volume. Where industrial production is built around speed and saving material, Donna works piece by piece. One lamp takes six hours, from bare panel to finished, glowing Halloween lamp.
Donna’s workshop, full of glass, patterns and finished lamps – the result of forty-one years of putting light through glass.
The end of an era – and one last chance
Donna closes the workshop for good on the thirty-first of October. “I have no successor. Nobody wants to learn this trade now – it takes years before you are any good at it, and there is no money in it until you are.”
There are still around 2,376 Halloween lamps on the shelves. Her life’s work. The last collection that will ever pass through her hands.
To get them into good hands before the season ends, she has done something unusual: a clear special price on every lamp. “It is not about the money for me anymore. I want them to end up in windows where somebody is actually glad to see them. With people who understand what goes into a piece like this,” Donna says. “My grandchildren Nora (26) and Dean (29) are handling the internet side of it – at my age I do not know the first thing about any of that,” she adds, laughing.
Dean also came up with the name Emberpane®. “He said it is not really a lamp. It is a pane of glass with an ember behind it, and that is exactly what it is.” The name stuck. And a small piece of seasonal decoration became, for a lot of customers, a fixed part of the evening.
What sets the Emberpane® apart
- Hand-finished, not mass-produced: every lamp is assembled, detailed and checked individually. No conveyor belt, no crate of identical parts.
- The three-layer build: coloured glass panel, raised lead-line lattice, hand-worked detail. That is why it reads as a window and not as a printed shade.
- The pattern comes off a real 1897 window: Donna’s own rebuild drawing was scanned, pencil corrections included. The bat’s left wing runs half an inch long, exactly as it does in the original.
- Warm-white light, no flicker: a warm LED on a USB feed – runs off any phone charger or power bank, so it can sit in an upstairs window with no cord down the wall.
- Built for the windowsill: 8.27 inches tall on a 5.12-inch footprint, on a solid cast base. Tall enough to be seen from the street, narrow enough that the curtain still closes behind it.
- Limited: around 2,376 Emberpanes® from Donna’s final collection. Once they are gone, there will be no new ones.
What real customers say about the Emberpane®
“I never thought one small lamp could change a room this much. In the evening, when it comes on and the whole window goes amber, the front of the house looks completely different. We turn it on before we sit down now, every night.”
– Sarah D., 56, Rutland, VT
“I work long hours and I am rarely home while it is light. Since the Emberpane® went on the sill I genuinely look forward to switching it on. Warm light, real colour – not the harsh orange flicker you get from the cheap ones.”
– Ken P., 38, Erie, PA
“I was sceptical – I assumed it would feel like cheap seasonal tat. It does not. It is heavier than I expected, the base is solid, and you can feel the black lines standing up off the glass with your thumb. It looks like something, switched off or on.”
– Marcy T., 54, Beaufort, SC
“My son adopted it immediately. He calls it the night watchman. Every evening he runs to the window to check whether it is on yet. You can tell somebody cared about how it was made.”
– Thomas K., 41, Naperville, IL
“The perfect gift for people you actually love”
What makes the Emberpane® a particular kind of gift is not only how it is built. It is the story behind it. “If you give somebody one of these, you are giving them a piece of real handwork. A small light for the window – and something that will never exist again,” Donna says.
Her customer Denise R., 48, from Silver Spring says the same thing: “I gave one to my mother two weeks ago for her front room. She had tears in her eyes. Not because of the lamp itself – because she could feel how much work was in it. Now she turns it on every evening. You cannot put a price on that.”
On the sill, facing the street – where Donna says the lamps belong.
Where can you buy Donna’s Halloween lamp?
Donna’s Emberpane® is available exclusively through this page, where her grandchildren Nora and Dean run her small shop section. It is the only place the originals from her workshop can be had. On Amazon and similar platforms there are already cheap copies in circulation – they look roughly similar and have nothing to do with Donna’s work.
Only until the end of October – then it is over
Donna closes the workshop for good on the thirty-first of October. “Until then I would like every one of them to be in good hands. After that it really is finished,” she says quietly. She smiles, a little wistfully. “Forty-one years. It was a good run.”
Anyone who still wants one of the original Emberpanes® from Donna’s last collection should not wait. Between the special price and the rush before Halloween, the shelves are not expected to hold out long.
It is the last chance to put a piece of real handwork in your own window – before Donna’s glowing lamps are history for good.
In short
The Emberpane® is the piece of Halloween decoration people actually keep. It is hand-finished on a three-layer build, and it feels less like seasonal decor than like a small lit window – warm colour, real depth, and a house that looks entirely different from the street the moment it comes on.
A well-made thing with a story behind it: carefully built, properly finished, thought through – and a small moment every single evening when it comes on. Thank you, Donna.
Get your Emberpane® and try it with no risk. With the 30-day money-back guarantee there is nothing to lose – put it in your own window and see it for yourself. If it does not do what you hoped, you get your money back.
Claim The Halloween PriceLimited quantity · around 2,376 remaining
The internet loves the Emberpane®
Customer photos, October 2025.
“I visited her workshop last week. Unbelievable atmosphere in there – glass everywhere, patterns, tools, that much care in every piece. I took three Emberpanes® home as gifts. My family is going to lose it when they see them lit.”
– Sarah G., Burlington, VT
“It makes me sad that craftswomen like her are disappearing and hardly anybody values the work anymore. I ordered two straight away – one for us, one for my parents. All of us are delighted with them.”
– The Novak family, Springfield, MO
“I love the face on the pumpkin – it has an actual expression. And the light is warm, not that harsh LED flicker. The Emberpane® is our little evening ritual now.”
– Laura S., Columbus, OH
“Our front window was always dark and a bit dull. Since the Emberpane® has been sitting there, neighbours actually stop and mention it. My kids call it the night watchman.”
– Jane P., Portland, ME
“So much character, so much warmth – we have never had anything like it in the house. When it comes on in the evening the whole front room changes.”
– Maria K., Ann Arbor, MI