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Despite that increasingly important role, nearly a decade passed before she came Tiffany Atlas with the idea that married her employer's long preoccupation with the beauty of glass and the left-over pieces from the stained-glass windows that had reigned for years as his firm's most recognized product. "She said, 'Why don't we use some of this beautiful glass to create something 3-dimensional?'" Conway says. "And she ended up creating what became Tiffany Flower charm bracelet best-known form." Like the windows, the lamps were the products of a labor-intensive, multi-step process that incorporated the talents of draftsmen, glass cutters and fabricators as well as designers. Often inspired by Tiffany's passion for natural forms and Tiffany Folded heart pendant admiration for the colors, textures and patterns of the Near and Far East, many if not most of them began as a sketch on Driscoll's drawing table before being transformed into watercolor cartoons. Then the patterns were transferred onto shaped wooden molds and filled in with various shapes and colors of glass by the cutters and fabricators. Rarer, harder-to-produce kinds of glass Tiffany Elsa Peretti the shade more expensive. So did the number of pieces, which could reach nearly 2,000 in such high-end designs as the "Wisteria." But by far the most important thing determining the visual impact of each work was the care and talent employed in selecting and arranging the glass colors and textures. "In my opinion, that's where the artistry lies," Conway says, comparing two instructive examples of a Tiffany "Peony" library lamp.