“After 41 years, I am done. These are the last ones I will ever make.” — Margie (68) is selling her final stained glass cat lamps at a special price. Her most popular design is retiring.

In a small mill workshop north of Boston, Marguerite Vance spent almost four decades restoring the stained glass windows of New England’s churches — and every autumn, she made something of her own. Now the 68-year-old is putting down her glass cutter for good, and saying goodbye with her most loved piece: the witch cat lamp. Why is this little glowing cat suddenly so sought after? Because this is the last time it will ever be offered.

Ipswich, September. The little workshop on the second floor of the old hosiery mill smells of flux, warm solder and dust. On the shelves sit dozens of cats — some still in loose pieces, others finished, their amber eyes catching the light. On the big work table lie sheets of purple and magenta glass, a grinder, a soldering iron, and a cardboard pattern worn soft at the edges. Margie Vance leans over one of her last pieces, the way she has since 1985. But this year is different. It is her last autumn.

“I am 68,” she says quietly. “And my eyes do not do what they used to.” She taps the corner of the light table. “The doctor calls it macular degeneration. The middle of whatever I look at is going, and it is not coming back. You cannot cut glass if you cannot see the line.”

She pauses, then adds something that clearly bothers her more. “And honestly, the world changed too. Hardly anyone pays for real handwork anymore. Everything is moulded plastic with a picture printed on it. My way of working is quietly disappearing.”

41 years, 63 churches — a life spent putting light through glass

Margie has done the maths. In 41 years she has restored the stained glass of 63 churches across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont. Hairline cracks in a 1911 rose window. A century of soot lifted off a Nativity panel, one square inch at a time.

“In the beginning it was only repairs,” she says. “You match what is already there and you disappear. Then in 2009 the bookshop in town asked me for something for their Halloween window — something with a bit of character. That is how the cat came about. First just as a figure, later with a light inside.”

It sold off the shop window in two days. She has made them every autumn since.

What makes Margie’s cat lamps so different

What makes her cats special is not just the friendly, slightly mischievous face. It is the copper-foil method — the Tiffany technique she learned restoring church windows and refined over four decades, a way of working that very few people still master.

The copper-foil build: Each of the 213 pieces of glass is cut by hand, wrapped in fine copper foil and soldered with a seam just a millimetre and a half wide — so your eye reads the glass, not the metal. Eighty-four of those pieces sit in the hat alone, each at its own angle, which is what gives the brim its curve. Inside sits a low-voltage USB bulb that stays cool to the touch. That combination is why a piece like this is still tight in ten years, while cheap decorations warp and loosen after a season or two.

“I have customers whose lamps have been lit every October for fifteen years”

Margie pulls an old wooden box out from under the workbench. Inside are hundreds of letters and cards. “Thank-you notes from customers. Some of them write every few years,” she says. She takes one out, dated 2011: “Dear Mrs Vance, your cat has sat in our hall window for eight Octobers now. Our granddaughter still says goodnight to it.”

There is a simple reason for that kind of lifespan: quality instead of speed. While factories optimise for output and thin materials, Margie works piece by piece. One lamp takes her the better part of a day — from the first score on the glass to the finished, glowing cat.

She keeps a bin in the corner of the workshop that she calls the graveyard. It is full of things people carried up two flights of stairs and asked her to repair. A cracked pumpkin lantern. A window hanging with the colour peeling off in strips. A “stained glass” angel that turned out to be printed film glued onto acrylic.

“I cannot fix any of them,” she says. “Not because I am not good enough. Because there is nothing in there to fix. Hold one up to a lamp and nothing happens. It just goes grey. Glass has to be looked through, or it may as well be a rock.”

The end of an era — and one last chance

At the end of October, Margie closes the workshop for good. “I have no successor. Nobody wants to learn this trade anymore — it takes years before you really have it in your hands.”

On the shelves there are still 409 cat lamps. Her life’s work. The last collection that will ever pass through her hands, cut in the 22 months after her diagnosis, in the best hours her eyes had left.

To get them into good hands before Halloween, she has done something unusual: a clear special price on every lamp. Her restoration work billed at $95 an hour, and on the New England craft fairs these cats sold for $180 apiece. “My niece Wren (34) helps me sell them online — at my age I do not know the first thing about all that internet business,” she adds, laughing.

It was Wren who photographed them on the light table and set the whole thing up over a single weekend. “She told me I was not going to spend my last good autumn standing behind a folding table in the cold. She was right.”

What sets Margie’s cat lamps apart

• 100% workshop-made: Every lamp is cut, foiled, soldered and finished individually by Margie herself — no moulds, no production line.
• 213 pieces of real glass: Cut one at a time, 84 of them in the hat alone. That is where the depth and the curve come from.
• The amber eyes: The only transparent glass in the whole piece. That is exactly why they light up first and can be seen from across a dark room.
• Cool-running USB light: Low voltage, plug and play, safe to leave on all evening — and gentle on the glass, because heat is what loosens leaded pieces over the years.
• Weighted bronze base: The mass sits low, so a cat’s tail or a slammed door does not put it on the floor.
• All year round: Made for Halloween, but most owners leave it out well past November — on a windowsill, a hall table or a bookshelf.
• Limited: Only 409 lamps left from Margie’s final collection. Once they are gone, there will be no new ones.

What real customers say about the cat lamp

• ★★★★★

  “I have bought a lot of Halloween things that looked better in the photo than in the box. This is the opposite. It is smaller than I pictured and about four times nicer — you can see it is separate pieces of glass the moment you pick it up.”

  – Deborah K., 61, Portsmouth, NH
• ★★★★★

  “I bought it for my mother, who has had the same three cats for twenty years. She put it on the hall table and now leaves it on all night, which she has never done with anything else in her life.”

  – Marc F., 44, Providence, RI
• ★★★★★

  “The eyes are the thing. From the kitchen you cannot see the whole cat, just two amber eyes glowing on the windowsill. My grandson checks on it every single time he comes over.”

  – Janice H., 67, Concord, NH
• ★★★★★

  “Third October it has been out on the porch and it is exactly as tight as the day it arrived. I have had string lights die faster. It also does not read as a Halloween thing to me — it has been on the shelf since last November and nobody has asked why it is still up.”

  – Ellen P., 52, Worcester, MA

“The perfect gift for people you actually care about”

What makes the cat lamp such a good gift is not only the work in it. It is the story behind it. “When you give somebody one of these, you are giving them a piece of real handwork,” Margie says. “A small light for the dark half of the year — and something that will never exist again.”

Her customer Priya R. (39) from Nashua confirms it: “I gave one to my sister for her birthday. She actually teared up — not because of the cat itself, but because she could feel how much work was in it. Knowing a woman losing her eyesight cut every single piece of it by hand makes it something else entirely. Then I had to order a second one the same week, for myself.”

Where can you buy Margie’s cat lamp?

The lamps are available exclusively through this page. Her niece Wren runs Margie’s small shop area there, and that is the only place you will get an original lamp out of her workshop.

Be careful elsewhere: on Amazon, Temu and similar platforms there are now cheap copies in circulation that look roughly similar in a photograph but have nothing to do with Margie’s handwork — moulded plastic with a stained-glass pattern printed on the surface. Hold one up to a light and you will see the difference immediately.

Every order comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If the lamp is not right for your home, one email to info@backroadgoods.com is enough and you get your money back.