SPARTA - Chad Moriarty slides open the furnace door. An orange glow bathes two pots of glass.

Moriarty dips a steel rod into one and pulls out a dollop, dripping like honey on a stick. He twirls it, a glowing gob of potential.

"You can make anything out of glass," Moriarty says - provided the glass gods aren't angry.

This one will be an ornament.

Moriarty rolls it on the marver, shaping and cooling the glass against the polished steel slab. He goes back to the oven for another gather.

The forced-air propane torch roars over classic rock music, while an industrial fan tempers the volcanic heat.

Metal bins hold glass frits - greens, reds, blues, cupcake sprinkles. They stick to molten glass like nuts on ice cream. In the oven, they melt into the surface.

Glass blowing is a dance, a series of moves to stay in the sweet spot. Let it cool too fast, it cracks. Too hot, it loses shape.

Glass is temperamental. Moriarty is anything but.

When a piece falls off the pipe and smashes on the floor, he sweeps up the pieces and starts over. If he thinks about it long enough, he usually can figure out what went wrong.

"You can't really blow glass frustrated," he says. "You start rushing things, and that's when bad things happen."

Moriarty is 30 and has curly red hair and wire-rimmed glasses, his arms bulked by days spent stacking 50-pound bags in a warehouse and nights twirling 10-pound gobs of glass at the end of a 4-foot blow pipe. A Massachusetts native, his "r"s go missing and show up in unexpected places.

He's as much craftsman as artist, a problem solver.

Moriarty never studied art growing up in Westport, Mass. At 18, on a whim, he took a class at Fried Glass Studios in nearby Little Compton, R.I. and got hooked.

"My dad was an electrician. That didn't intrigue me," Moriarty said. "As soon as I found glass, it was like, huh, this could be a little thing I've got."

Soon he was going every weekend.

Moriarty apprenticed with John Elias, mass-producing ornaments at night while working at a nursery during the day.

Elias said Moriarty came with some basic skills and quickly picked up on the choreography of blowing.

"Chad is what we call a natural," he said. "He was able to see it and figure out how to do it."

He also learned the business end of the trade.

In 2004, Moriarty joined his parents in Florida and found a space in Punta Gorda. With money from his family and help from friends, he opened his own studio, which he named Southern Fried Glass, a nod to his first teacher.

Whatever he could he built by hand, assembling the oven from angle iron and fire brick, welding rolling yokes out of leftover iron.

Business was good, and Southern Fried Glass turned a profit.

Four years later, Angela Steidl was on vacation with a college friend when her friend's grandmother told them about a glass studio. They wound up there as Moriarty was giving a demonstration to a group of older women.

"I was excited to see two cute girls in my studio," he said.

On the third day, Angela bought a glass fish. Moriarty asked how long they were in town. They were leaving the next day.

Moriarty e-mailed to make sure the fish arrived safely in Wisconsin. E-mails escalated to phone calls and then plane tickets.

When it got too hard to say goodbye, Moriarty packed up and headed north.

It meant taking a full-time job at Century Foods until he can re-grow his glass sales to cover the $800-a-month propane bill and support a family.

In October 2008, the couple, now engaged, bought a house and set to turning the cinderblock barn into a new studio. They poured concrete floors, painted the walls teal, canary and red, and cut away the ceiling to open work space. A front room serves as the gallery.

Unlike some glass blowers, Moriarty welcomes visitors and even offers classes.

His moves are swift but careful as he steps back to his bench. He does not want to touch the pipe in the wrong place.

Once he's shaped the glass by spinning it in a moistened apple-wood cup, he puts the pipe to his lips and blows. The glass expands like a soap bubble.

A kevlar sleeve protects his arm when he puts the finished piece into a 900-degree annealer, where it slowly will cool to room temperature. Even so, there's not much hair on his arms.

Elias calls Moriarty's style eclectic - blending classic pieces with non-traditional materials. Glass petals on steel rebar form a flower, ribs and scales on steel make a dinosaur.

Moriarty also cranks out smaller pieces - vases, bowls, ring holders and ornaments - for quicker sale. He said he hasn't found a niche and has a hard time making the same thing twice.

And even after a 40-hour work week, he can't wait to fire up the oven.

"It can be pretty peaceful," he said. "When you're making stuff, you're very rarely thinking about anything but what you're making. You just concentrate on the work."