Find someone else whose work you like (and whom you also can get on with personally) and introduce yourself. I started in glass by offering my studio assistance free one day a week in exchange for the experience. It wasn't long before my friend/employer started including me in his budgets to clients (he was doing mostly architectural commissions) and voila I was a paid employee.

The combination of economic crunch and escalating gas prices is hitting a lot of glass studios right now (well, a lot of art studios period). The Seattle area is losing small studios left and right and up here in Canada it's not much better. My main gallery in Victoria (which has an in house hot shop) is running only one of two glory holes and has let staff go. There are a few hotshops running electric melt furnaces but they're few and far between, usually one man ops, and even they are having trouble selling work right now. Lousy time to be an artist, as we try to make our livings off folk with extra play money, and that's getting thin. We just have to grit our teeth and hope the frigging war stops, Bush and his cronies get turfed, and that people move on with their glorious consuming of pretty things *lopsided grin*