I've always been drawn toward fire and I've liked hot things since the time when I began to walk. When I was 18 months old, my mother said I would wander into the kitchen, pull up a chair to the new gas stove and turn up all four burners to high. I would grab an iron skillet, throw in flour, salt, and pepper, put it on the burners, and merrily stir away. The only way she could stop my borderline suicidal behavior was to lock me out of the kitchen. Eventually she let me back in and when I was four, you could find me drawing and finger painting while sitting next to that same nice hot stove.

I have continued to work in creative media all my life. I spent several years doing watercolor and acrylic painting, and then stained glass and fused glass. I began making lampwork glass beads in 2004 and have been focused on that ever since. I am in love with the incredible diversity of color and form that I can create in glass and find myself always thinking of ways to reflect the beauty of the natural world in the realistic and fantasy objects I make for personal adornment and decoration.

You can find my individual work at Betty Hanssen Lampwork Beads (www.bettyhanssen.com).

I find myself drawn to create fluid forms that join with sharp edges and points like the way the stalk of a growing plant can flow into a sharply defined bud, flower, or cluster of seeds. I like to work "in the moment" and so all of my work is in a sense one-off. Even when I'm creating multiple pieces of similar design, I try to focus my attention on each piece individually and create each shaped form as if it were the only thing I was going to make that day.