09/04/2026
🧁 A little bit about your baker, Christine Harmet. That’s me owner of Sweet Meadow Bakery.
❤️ Especially for my new followers I thought I would tell you about how I got to this point in my life. Where I find myself cooking from my home bakery.
I’ve always loved to draw! I remember as a child stealing the comics out of the, Pontiac Daily Leader, and drawing Garfield or taking my sillyputty and pressing it on the comic and stretching and distorting the image.
My love of art continued through high school, making sure to always take fine art and graphic art classes. 🎨
Then I decided to go to ICC in East Peoria for graphic design. I loved both the fine art classes and the illustration classes.
🎭 For me creating fine art is like therapy. Dark and twisty😳
💥 Graphic design felt like a job, and since I was a single mom at the time a job was what I was looking for!
🕸️ Pat and I got married in 1998 and he bought me my first computer and I started creating websites at home.
But websites wasn’t all I was doing. When I married Pat I moved to the Gibson city area onto his farm and learned how to drive a tractor, combine, semi tractor and how to do the bookkeeping for the farm. 🚜
Cooking for a large family of seven, and helping cook for big fundraisers at church…my love for baking was slowly growing 🪻🌷
📷When websites became more animated I decided to move on and started doing photography. Weddings, senior pictures etc. I would spend hours editing photos in adobe photoshop. Then all of a sudden everyone could edit photos on their phones in seconds. Honestly, though. I couldn’t handle the pressure and sold my camera to Vivid Studios.
Then Dean Summer’s kept asking me every Sunday at Bible study to drive a bus, and I eventually gave in. So glad too, because I love my friends at the bus garage!!❤️❤️
I also was the bookkeeper at the Gibson city Bible church for a few years, but when my oldest daughter Lexi got engaged I decided to put all my energy into her wedding and get back to creating. 💒
🖌️I learned calligraphy and created her invitations and addressed all of them too. Made a huge backdrop for photos and wrote all 200 some names on the seating chart mirror…etc. etc.. 😅
🏠 When we renovated our new/113yr old house that hadn’t been lived in for forty years I became an electrician and plumber too. That was a rough year, but well worth it. I love my kitchen and was able to turn the attic into a studio/spare room.
And now finally. How I started the bakery (if you’ve read this far you deserve a free cupcake and should let me know in the comments). ❤️
The actual hardest year was last year when my fifth child left and I became an empty nester. This is when I decided to take my Mom’s advice and start the bakery. She would always tell me at dinners, “This is so good! You could sell it!” So here I am. Making art that you can eat! I hope that it fills your tummy and your heart. It has certainly filled mine!💕
