"Yes!" she shouts. In her everyday working garb--including a vest festooned with Looney Tunes characters, a blouse embroidered with pink butterflies and three earrings in each of her ears--she does a quick two-step in celebration of the successful cut. Never mind that it's perhaps her millionth perfect glass-sundering. Never mind, because Vloeberghs loves her work. Crank up the verb: adores, treasures, cherishes, exalts, embraces, glorifies, idolizes. The alchemy of lead, glass and light imbues her with a religious fervor. Of her tenure in this cramped, hot Atlanta studio, she says "I've been in heaven for 18 years.

Constantly talking, constantly moving, a font of crackling energy, Vloeberghs, 51, is among the country's best leaded-glass craftsmen, designing and assembling ovals, trapezoids, rhomboids, cabochons and one-of-a-kind flowing forms into domes, transoms, skylights, sidelights, doors, cabinet fronts and stand-alone art pieces for hundreds of fine houses, mostly in the Southeast. You can say she makes stained glass--most people do--and she sometimes says it herself, but she prefers the term leaded glass because most of her work consists of clear glass, with only the occasional touch of color.

"I hate most stained glass," says Norman Askins, an Atlanta architect for whom Vloeberghs has created more than 200 pieces. "But Pat's windows go to another level."

With shears, she divides the cutout pattern into templates, lays each on a piece of glass and traces around it with a marking pen. She etches that outline with her glass cutter; the tool, the size of a fat pencil, has an oiled carbide wheel that plows a tiny groove in the glass surface. She breaks straight scores with one quick, confident snap. Curves are tougher. To make a deep concave cut, she must break off a series of shallower concave scores, any one of which might split off crazily and wreck the piece. She never forgets that restoration glass, which mimics the swirls and bubbles of 19th-century handblown panes, costs her $50 a square foot." You've got serious motivation to make that cut work," she says.

After cutting, she arranges the glass pieces on the layout pattern. "I could just put them in a box, but the layout pattern helps you keep track of what goes where," she says. Then she assembles them on the building pattern. Quality leaded-glass work demands obsessive, surgical precision--without it, tiny measurement errors magnify until, as the work nears completion, the glass pieces can wander ¼ inch or more from the building lines. When craftsmen try to compensate by sneaking in off-sized pieces, the result is both asymmetrical and structurally weak. "Every bump that you don't smooth out creates a pressure point," she says. Under stress, such as wind or a paperboy's errant toss, "that's where it will blow out."

Building leaded glass seems a genteel art-the soft scritch of scoring the panes, the rhythmic tap-tap of the horseshoe-nail hammer--but is actually freighted with danger. There is nothing sharper than broken or cut glass; literally a molecule wide, the edge can pass through flesh like a sword through smoke. On December 6, 1996, Vloeberghs’s apprentice, Rebecca Owens, then 22, dropped a 30-by-7-inch freshly cut pane across her upturned left wrist. The glass severed an artery, two tendons and a nerve and chipped the bone. Vloeberghs threw Owens into her station wagon and roared to Piedmont Hospital in 10 minutes as the young woman's lap filled with blood. A person Owens's size-5 feet 10 inches and 118 pounds-normally has about 5 quarts of blood. Doctors estimated that, by the time she reached the hospital, she had lost nearly 3. Had they waited for an ambulance, Vloeberghs was told, Owens would have bled to death.

Throughout, two memories percolated in her subconscious. One was her first recollection: staring, at age 2, at the glorious stained-glass windows at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Kalamazoo. Vloeberghs was born with synesthesia, a rare perceptual condition that causes the senses to mix and mingle. For her, sunlight pouring through the windows literally made music. "Blue was a deep bass," she says. "With gold hues, the tones got higher. Greens were cool, soft, modulated tones. I just devoured those windows." The second memory was of the blissful days she spent as a child with her grandfather on the shores of Michigan's Gun Lake. "He began painting when he was in his 60s," she says. "He would wake me before sunrise and take me outside. We'd get down on our bellies and watch the sun coming up through the dewdrops on the grass. We would study the veins on leaves, how the moss climbed the trees." With his encouragement, she started painting in oils at 7; at 9, she sold landscapes at art shows. "He always told me, 'You can be anything if you work hard enough. Put one foot in front of the other and go."'