Garden Inspiration

A large amount of our materials and inspiration comes from the beach. But the beach is not our only source of natural found materials, the forest and our own garden gives us gifts too.
These feathers are of the Eurasian Jay, I find them one by one in our garden and collect them together to eventually make earrings of them. We made several pairs in the past and they were all sold out so it was time for a new pair.

This is the only picture of the Jay I have been able to capture, they constantly hop from one branch to the other and usually pretty high up in our pine trees. He is mostly black but the wings have those blue stripe details which you can not see in this picture.

And here are the earrings, the feathers are accompanied with vintage abalone shell drops and handmade lampwork beads, very bohemian and although pretty large, very light weighted.

This year we have much more Cicada's than usual, I only notice it from the amount of noise, but also of the amounts of skeletons I found. I have been collecting their beautiful wings, they are weightless yet strong, pretty amazingly constructed. I am not fond of the insect themselves so won't show an image of that :)

I've made a necklace by pairing a pair of wings and sandwiching them between two crystal cut glass pieces and soldering a frame around that. This way you can appreciate the beauty of the wings and they will be protected. I've just listed the necklace a few minutes ago.

These feathers are not collected from our garden. They are the feathers of a friend's parakeet. Again cruelty-free feathers, I only collect those that the little guy leaves behind, he himself is unharmed and happy.

Here is the source of my material :) He is very cute, and has a large cage which is open all day so that he is free to wander. If left without attention for a while he will walk after you like a pup, very cute :)

And here are the first earrings made with his feathers, together with vintage enameled brass triangles and handmade lampwork beads.

Flickr Favorites- Wonder Cabinets

1. Sea Shell Spring, 2. globe collection, 3. Portrait of Ginevra d'Antoino Lupari in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2008, 4. Macro of a Snail Shell

We just launched our new collection, The Wonder Cabinet Collection. This mosaic is all inspired by those cabinets. Visit ArtMind's blog to see more mosaics and join the fun!


Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Wunderkammer, Cabinets of Wonder, or wonder-rooms) were encyclopedic collections of types of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings) and antiquities. The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction. (Images and information are taken from WikiPedia).




We have been experimenting with treasures we found during our walks on the beach and forests, to keep them safe for a long time. The best and most interesting results gave the idea to cast them in resin (epoxy) which gives a glass effect and which will make sure that the finding will be safe for a very long time. The treasures reminds us of the Wonder Cabinets, which were started at the early 1500's by rich men, collections of natural and non natural finds were all shown in the Cabinet (room) of Curiosities. Beside the natural finds we will be using alot of vintage finds for this collection, to give that good old feeling. These pieces are the first ones, and we are still in the process of making many others...