Erin Daniels Bangle, a humanities, English, photography, yearbook, and art teacher at On Track Academy, decided she would offer something unique to her students: instruction in making stained glass.

“I wanted to come up with something unusual for my art students at On Track to do, something that they could claim, ‘This is something we get to do here,’” Erin says. “It’s a very unusual hobby, and it’s not something just anybody can do.”

Erin picked up the skill in her childhood from a neighbor.

“She didn’t have kids and she was so sweet to me,” Erin says. “I’d come over—I used to clean her house and stuff like that. She was awesome. She used to [make stained glass], and I’d go over there and she’d let me do it with her sometimes.”

Erin admits that Emma Daniels, her fifteen-year-old daughter who attends Lewis and Clark High School, is her star pupil. Emma started when she was ten, hanging out in her mom’s classroom.

Emma is much more reserved than her gregarious mother, and her confidence and precision with a soldering iron—set at 880 degrees—is both intimidating and impressive.

“I love teaching my girls how to solder,” Erin says. “It’s just not something we normally teach our daughters. It’s something really cool in my art room when my girls are soldering.”

With little sisters, Emma has also had to learn a great deal of patience.

“My little sister opened the window and my pattern was laid out, and it blew everywhere, so I had put them back in like puzzle pieces,” Emma says.

Erin confesses that she often turns to Emma for some of the technical details in her work. 

“I teach humanities for a reason,” Erin says. “I’ve never been good at math, and she’s so good at math. She just uses both sides of her brain.”

Erin often jokes that whoever got her baby at the hospital must be so angry. Though Erin gushes about her daughter as any mother would, Emma’s work backs up the effusiveness. 

What’s possibly most impressive about Emma is her ability to execute techniques through trial and error. During walks the family took during the beginning of the pandemic, Emma began gathering flowers, which she pressed. But then, she pressed them again—between two sheets of glass. She made a clear hummingbird this way, but even more standout is her layered ribcage: the pearlescent bones of the front of the body overlap the backbones, liberally decorated with pressed flowers, using the soldering iron to articulate the detail of the bones.

“I’ve seen some other stained glass artists do little things like that where they press flowers between the glass, and then I had to figure out how they do it,” Emma says.

That simple.

When Emma was commissioned by Wishing Tree Books to create a stained glass window, the two started to realize that maybe they could turn this into a business—or more accurately, a side hustle. Partially to recoup the cost of their expensive hobby, and partially to teach Emma a new skill—how to handle a business, from marketing to shipping—the duo decided that would begin selling their work, thus the creation of “Erin and Emma’s Side Hustle.”

Popular this season are the 3-D glass poinsettias the two have been selling, though Erin has been making most of them because Emma is hard at work on a series of windows—four elements—that was commissioned by a local landscape architect for his home.

“Selfishly, it’s fun to have a hobby with her,” Erin says. “She’s fun to hang out with.”

You can find Erin and Emma’s stained glass gift shop on Facebook at @ErinEmmaSideHustle. Wait times may vary—it’s a side hustle, after all.