We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nicki Dydak a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Nicki , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?

I have made many attempts to sell my artwork over the years. I had had a few commissions here and there, but nothing with any staying power. That is until just before Valentines Day 2022, when several unrelated things led me to start my business overnight.

It was cold, I was stuck inside and bored, daydreaming about spring and the upcoming foraging season. I was very much a beginner forager and had little interest in the items you can find in winter here in Virginia. I wanted more mushrooms. I began absently scrolling through mushroom groups on Facebook when I came across a set of magnets someone had shared. They were simple bracket type mushrooms in a very colorful tie-dye, psychedelic kind of style. While there is a well-established market for neon mushroom décor, I simply didn’t like them. I felt like real life mushrooms had plenty to offer on their own and didn’t need a technicolor makeover to be fascinating. While I never considered myself a sculptor, I DID happen to have some lightweight polymer clay tucked away after impulsively buying it at extreme discount years before. I also had magnets on hand because a friend had made dinosaur magnets for a baby shower hosted at my home, again many years before. Several had broken in the time since the shower leaving the bear magnets unused on my fridge. It really is a sorta one in a million chance that I happened to have those materials on that day.

So, I sculpted, baked, and painted my first four mushroom magnets and gave them as Valentine’s gifts to friends. I posted a photo of my work in my mushroom Facebook groups and the comment sections IMMEDIATELY filled up with people wanting to order them! I was completely shocked! I had had no plans of selling them but was not going to let this opportunity go. I quickly came up with a business name (using fantasy name generator and dictionary.com), threw together a social media presence and started taking commissions. I had worked at several small businesses before and that gave me the blueprint I needed to make things happen fast. I worked solely off of commissions for a couple months before finally quitting my job and setting up my website.

And that is how I made my first dollar as Midnight Thicket, completely by accident.

Nicki , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Nicki Dydak and I am the owner and artist at Midnight Thicket in Richmond, VA. I have been making forest inspired artworks for about 2 years now. I am most known for my lifelike mushroom magnets. I run my business with the goals of connecting with the maker community and encouraging others to forage, camp, and explore.

Midnight Thicket items are made primarily using polymer clay and acrylic paint. I hand make magnets, wine corks, incense dishes, jewelry and more depicting lifelike mushrooms. I sculpt each piece completely by hand with no molds so each is completely one of a kind. I love the idea of functional fine arts. Each mushroom item comes with a simple info card including fun facts about the mushroom they are based on. Foraging is a very accessible skill and I hope that the info cards, and my work in general, encourage people to learn more about the living things around us. Anyone can make cute mushroom stuff, but I like to set myself apart by educating as I go. In addition to my popular mushroom items, I sculpt forest creatures, plants and cottagecore magnets, make linocut prints on hand dyed paper, and hand paint spoons, antiques and bones. I keep my general theming to the forest but love to experiment with new things.

I have been creating all of my life as I am from a big family of creative people. Everyone on my mother’s side creates SOMETHING and the variety of artworks from the family is VAST! Family get-togethers often included a project and inevitably included someone showing off their own latest works from fine arts to graffiti to metalworks to crochet. Of course, my favorite artist of them all is my incredibly talented mother. She was always painting on something. She led us in Christmas crafts every year, turned yard sale trash into treasure and we always had the most beautiful mailbox in the neighborhood. There are many people back home who consider one of Mom’s hand painted gourds as one of their prized possessions.
Being surrounded by so many beautiful handmade things growing up, I knew I wanted art to be a big part of my adult life as well, but it took a very long time to find my own niche. Sadly, my mother has been gone for several years and never got to see my art business take shape, but it is not hard for me to picture her reaction. She would be proudly sharing my work online and insisting I walk her thru the steps for my most popular pieces so she could make her own with her own flare to them. Her creativity and fearlessness in trying new techniques and materials continue to inspire me as I grow my business.

I have been proud of my business from the beginning, and it is hard to nail down when I have felt the most pride. I have been proud when experienced foragers recognize one of my mushroom magnets or point out a detail that helped them ID it as if it were a real mushroom. I have been proud when putting my pride mushrooms out at small town markets and seeing the reaction they get from the young LGBTQ folks who aren’t used to representation so close to home. I have been proud when a piece of marketing advice I gave helps a fellow maker get the most out of their business. I have been proud at out of states events when someone pops in to my booth only to realize they already own several of my pieces. I’m proud when customers say they are sending my work to family overseas to remind them of home. Honestly, I am just proud of Midnight Thicket in its entirety.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I run my business with the goal of encouraging others to forage, camp, and explore. Many years ago I taught preschool and it always struck me how my class could identify tons of international animals, but only a couple from their own backyard. The US has such amazing, unique and diverse ecosystems and yet so many people just aren’t aware of how much is there. Not just fascinating animals, but delicious wild edibles. I began foraging just 5 years ago and it has completely changed how I view the world around me and my place in it. Even my own backyard was full of amazing natural treasures waiting to be identified. That love of foraging absolutely inspired my popular mushroom magnets and as I continue with my art and business, nature and encouraging others to find it for themselves has become my mission.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

My resilience was most tested years before I started my own business. I was working as an early childhood educator in my hometown. I loved my teaching job but had to work two jobs on top of it to make ends meet. I was stuck in a miserable marriage and didn’t think often about the future because I was so wearied by the right now. Of course, if you had asked me at the time I would have said everything was fine. I was young and what is happy anyway? I honestly think I would still be living that numb and unfulfilled life, had I not stepped in a hole while running on the school’s playground. The resulting fall completely changed my life. I tore nearly every ligament in my left knee, chipped a bone and frayed a nerve responsible for controlling my left foot. It took more than a week after the ambulance drove me away to understand the extent of my injury. In that time my assistant teacher called me daily to ask angrily when I would return and to say “well I worked with a twisted ankle, I don’t know why you can’t.” Then it was months of surgery, doctors, physical therapy, and endless time to really look at my life. I had only a few visitors because my husband had discouraged my friendships. My beloved job was happy to share their displeasure with me. I was completely dependent on a person who did not cook and believed I should only be fed only once a day for my own good anyway. I was lonely and sick from the meds and just in a really ugly place. I thought about how weird it was to be hurt so badly over something so mundane and I thought of how one wrong step could change everything so fast. I call this time in my life my “hit by a bus moment.” I thought about if my injury had been something more severe. What if I was hit by a bus? What if I had died then THIS sad little life would be my legacy. A job to whom I was expendable and few friends who’d managed to weather the storms with me and a marriage that everyone knew was a bad idea from the start. That would have been my entire mark on the world. And then I got pissed. I refused to let this be who I was. I promised myself that when I could get out of that bed again, I was going to make bold choices for ME. I was not going to let anyone else choose my future for me and was not going to let fear keep me from trying things. I wanted to live a life I was proud of.
Six months later I was living in a rented room with my cat in the house of a stranger unable to walk without a brace for the time being. I could not have been happier and it feels looking back, like it only got better. I rekindled old friendships and made many new ones, tried several career paths, and am now happily remarried. Life doesn’t magically get easier and I had a lot of unlearning and relearning to do, ups and downs, but I know now that that misstep on the playground was a first step to living a more honest and fulfilled life. I still have problems, I still have days where I struggle, but now I can look back and know for sure that I can handle hard things.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.midnightthicket.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/midnightthicket
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/midnightthicket