The Process
Every piece that leaves our hands has already lived a small lifetime before it ever reaches a shelf — sketched, sculpted, repainted, and looked at far too many times before we're satisfied. Here's what that actually looks like, step by step.
Where it starts
Nothing begins with clay. It begins on a forest walk, in an old field guide, in the particular way afternoon light catches the underside of a toadstool's cap. We collect these moments almost obsessively — a color, a curve, a texture — and let them sit in our head until they refuse to leave. That's usually the sign a piece is ready to be made.
Built, not molded
No molds, no shortcuts, no two ever quite the same. Each cap and stem is pinched and smoothed from raw air-dry clay, often under a loupe, chasing the small asymmetries that make a mushroom feel like it grew rather than got manufactured. A single cluster can take hours before it even resembles the thing we saw in our head — and it's rarely right the first time.
Chasing real light
This is where most of the magic happens, and most of the frustration. Real mushrooms are never one flat color — they blush, fade, and catch light differently across every millimeter. We build color in thin, translucent layers, testing glaze after glaze, until the surface finally does what light does on something that's actually alive. Some pieces go through six or seven coats before we're willing to let them go.
A world to grow in
Every sculpture needs somewhere to belong. We comb flea markets, forest floors, and secondhand shops for the objects that will carry it — a cracked snail shell, a stopped pocket watch, driftwood pulled from a riverbank after a storm. Moss is trimmed and set strand by strand until the two feel like they grew together, not like one was simply glued to the other.
Before it leaves us
Before anything is sealed, it sits on our windowsill for a day or two — long enough to catch us off guard, to make us forget for a second that we're the ones who made it. Only then does it get its final coat, ready to sit quietly on someone else's shelf and do the exact same thing to them.
From first sketch to finished piece, most pieces take 3–5 days of hands-on work. We make in small batches, which means some collections sell out — and don't always come back the same way twice.