[5]: 59 Over a six-decade career, Betteridge taught and mentored several generations of Canadian metal artists, smiths, and jewellers, including First Nations sculptor Mary Anne Barkhouse,[6] and fellow Bronfman Award winner Kye-Yeon Son.

[8] In 1953, Betteridge opened a studio-gallery in Toronto on the edge of the affluent Rosedale neighbourhood, which enabled her to make initial contacts with designers, architects, collectors and other sources of commission work.

[9]: 36 After completing her graduate degree, Betteridge returned to Canada once more, and for three years taught weaving, design and metal arts at the MacDonald Institute (now part of the University of Guelph).

In the period between resigning and completing her arrangements, however, she met and married Keith Betteridge, a young English post-graduate student at the Ontario Veterinary College (now also part of the University of Guelph).

In 1961 they moved to England, where Betteridge balanced the care of a young family and the establishment of her studio practice, while her husband completed doctoral studies in veterinary medicine.

In the midst of the year-long social and cultural celebration that marked the nation’s Centennial Year, she found that the Canadian craft movement had finally developed critical mass.

A tiny, chased and repousséed bee in the recessed lid, and a golden quartz cabochon set in the handle of the stirrer, make droll references to the vessel’s use.

[1] In the 1980s, Betteridge undertook a new series of vessels composed of spherical, columnar and conical forms, fabricated in silver sheet combined with brass, copper, plexiglass, and rubber.

[10]: 13  A later example of this phase of her work is the vessel Essence, 2007, which contrasts a fluid, organic form with the precise rendering of recessed, geometric shapes, the whole overlaid with a consistent hammered texture.

Betteridge’s time at Cranbrook shaped her aesthetic development, imbuing her work with the sculptural quality, clarity of form and technical proficiency that characterizes the American and Scandinavian schools of modernist design.

According to Ross Fox, curator of Canadian Decorative Arts at the Royal Ontario Museum (retired), it is "through her students that Lois has had the greatest impact on the craft, placing her at the very fulcrum of its national progress during the late twentieth century; there are few contemporary silversmiths in Canada who have not been under her tutelage".

[10]: 6 Betteridge taught and mentored numerous Canadian metal artists who have achieved prominence in their own right, including Beth Alber, Jackie Anderson, Anne Barros, Brigitte Clavette, Lois Frankel, Kye-Yeon Son and Ken Vickerson.