Midwest Creative Collective

My name is Vikki Baptiste, of Bloomington, IL, and I wish I could start with the “I’ve always been the creative type …..” line, but I would be lying.

I’m still not sure I have a single creative bone in my body!

I have always loved jewelry though. My introduction to lampwork came not long after I moved from Australia to the States in 1998. My mother-in-law had a wonderful beading room with boxes and boxes of semiprecious stones and vintage findings, as well as glass beads, buttons, porcelain beads and a whole array of wonderful goodies to make jewelry with. She introduced me to a friend of hers who wanted to learn lampwork and I basically went along because she thought the guy teaching her was not the kind of man she wanted to be left alone with!

To cut a long story short, I stuck with it longer than she did, and I’ve since set up a studio in my basement. As a single parent, working full time and then some, I don’t get a lot of time to melt glass these days, so luckily my jewelry designs incorporate many other elements.

That’s me in a nutshell …. hmm, nutshell … can you solder those??

OK - so I had to come back and edit - everyone wrote longer “About Me’ pages than I did, but that’s OK. I read on Patty’s page that she says she has AADD (Art Attention Deficit Disorder) so I came back to add that I tell people I have BADD (Bead Attention Deficit Disorder), I have great trouble making sets, and trouble concentrating on something for any great length of time. Therefore, most of my beads are small.