Vickie Porter

Among her many collections, Vickie creates one-of-a-kind pendants from old dominoes and collages of tiny clippings.When inspiration strikes, Vickie makes sure a sketchpad is never far from reach.

“It’s within two feet at all times,” she says. “I think I’ve generated enough ideas at this point to stop writing new ones down. I’m not going to get to all of them.”

The ideas come to her at light speed.

“Sometimes I just get this mental flash of a piece and I have to scribble it down quickly before it is lost forever,” Vickie says.

VickieShe hasn’t lost too many, judging from the range and originality in her work. Her arts and crafts business—aptly named In My Head Studios—features a vast and varied assortment of jewelry, journals, and trading cards.

And the common denominator in all of it is paper—from the sketchpad where her concepts are first captured, to the precious fragments she uses to form images, scenes and motifs in her work.

Paper and acrylic, 12" x 12" (unframed).“I mainly consider myself a paper artist,” says the Rochester, NY, resident. “Because almost all of my work uses paper in some form.”

Those forms include paintings, prints and pendants—sometimes all at once. She’s created an entire collection of pendants made from old dominoes, which began with a gift from her grandmother.

“I casually mentioned to her that I needed a few dominoes for a new project,” Vickie says. “Not long after, she had amassed a collection of about 700. I had to quickly find a use for them as they were taking up a lot of room.”

And that she did. The domino pendants have tiny fragments of photos, words and paint that create intricate vignettes. In fact, if you’re going to see Vickie’s work at an art show, bring your magnifying glass so you can fully appreciate it.

Here, Vickie sands the edge off a new piece at her studio.“I work with ridiculously small pieces of paper to make the collages for the dominoes, Scrabble tiles, and microscope slide glass pendants,” Vickie says. “Some collages I make for dominoes use pieces of paper about one-by-two millimeters.”

When she isn’t busy in her studio, Vickie takes some time to give back to other budding artists and craftspeople at Rochester’s Studio 34, a glass and beading shop where she teaches. But this time of year, what’s foremost in her head?

The holiday season.

“Right now I’m planning for that,” she says. “Applying for shows, deciding what I’m going to get myself into next, ordering supplies, making holiday items.”

New collections in the works for 2010 include accessories made from poker chips.

It’s a good bet they’ll be a hit. 

See more: Vickie on Etsy, Flickr, Blogspot, and Twitter 

Say hi: inmyheadstudios@gmail.com