Hi and thanks for looking! It's about time that I edited this page, as it was horribly out of date. My name is Ellen Gaimari and I have been lampworking and playing with beads since 2001. I took my first lampworking class on a whim - I loved playing with beads but I had never felt like making them. I had taken many seed beading classes and loved working with them - especially bead crochet, so I figured what the heck, I'll try something new. I signed DH and myself up for a one-day class and we went and I thought it was great, and I was glad I did it, but I thought it was nothing that I'd ever want to do again. Then I kept finding myself thinking about it again and again. I'd think about the way the glass turned from solid to liquid. I thought about the soft hiss of the torch. I thought about the fun surprise of seeing the beads after they came out of the kiln. My thoughts kept returning to melting glass. And I wanted to continue to melt glass and make beads. I was officially hooked, and the rest is history.