Derbyshire stained-glass artist goes Beyond the Bloom after BBC success

Beyond the Bloom:

How a BBC programme transformed a stained glass flower maker into a businesswoman with a significant project

Beetles and Bloom  |  www.beetlesandbloom.com

Back in 2023, Emily Smale a midlands – based stained glass artist, applied to appear on the BBC programme Make It at Market with an idea: to create everlasting stained-glass flowers that could be delivered through the letterbox. Having no idea where to begin, Emily applied in the hope that, with guidance from an experienced mentor, she might be able to turn her idea into a viable business. Little did she know that, after her episode aired, her newly named business, Beetles and Bloom, would be catapulted into success, selling more than 2000 flowers and doing a wide range of different commissions.

Emily later returned to the BBC for the first episode of I Made It at Market, a follow-up series revisiting craftspeople from the original programme to discover how they started—and where they are now.

Since her first BBC appearance, Emily has come an incredibly long way. Alongside running her full-time business—creating everlasting stained-glass flowers and sending them to customers across the UK and beyond—she has been working on her most ambitious commission yet: a pair of five-foot stained-glass window panels. The commission came from a viewer who discovered Emily’s work after her first appearance on the BBC. He purchased Lady Moon, a statement piece filmed during the episode, he later commissioned a second artwork, Lady Auburn, followed by the two large window panels. Given creative freedom over their design, Emily embraced the opportunity to push her work, skills and imagination to an entirely new scale.

Throughout the process, Emily admits she has often been hard on herself. Having never worked with glass on such a large scale, enlarging her original design pushed her far outside her comfort zone. Creating the mermaid’s flowing hair and tail—making them appear full, natural and suspended beneath the water—was particularly intricate and time-consuming.

The project tested her skills, patience and confidence, but the finished window became something far greater than she had imagined.

“The result is beyond anything I ever expected I could create,” says Emily.

The second window will be a companion to the mermaid panel, but this time the lady will stand on land surrounded by flowers—a fitting nod to Emily’s beginnings in stained glass. What started as an idea for everlasting letterbox flowers has grown into a full-time career and opportunities she never imagined possible.

Watch Emily on BBC iPlayer – I Made it at Market – Episode 1