The Coffin Shelf: A Small Museum of Things That Were Already Gone
This time of year, the insects start dying of natural causes — a wasp done guarding a nest that's already served its purpose, a cicada finished with its one loud summer, a dragonfly whose flying season has quietly ended. Kyle brings me some. I find the rest myself, usually somewhere I wasn't expecting to look.
I've started encasing them in resin. Not to change what they are — just to keep them from disappearing entirely.
An Old Habit, Older Than Me
People have been doing some version of this for centuries — cabinets of curiosities, specimens under glass, small dead things kept because they were beautiful and because keeping them felt like a kind of respect. I didn't set out to build one. It just sort of happened, one resin pour at a time, until I looked up and realized I had a whole coffin-shaped shelf doing exactly that.
It felt right that the shelf is shaped like it is. Everything on it has already finished the part of its life that mattered.
What Each One Became
The wasp went in still tending its nest — I couldn't bring myself to separate them, so the resin caught both, mid-labor, glossy and permanent now in a way the actual paper never could have been.
The cicada kept its wings. That's the part I love most — the veining goes translucent under resin, amber and delicate, like something that was already halfway to glass before I ever touched it.
The dragonfly is my favorite. Under the right light its wings still throw that violent little shimmer of blue, caught mid-flight forever, which feels like the least I could do for something that spent its whole life moving.
Why I Keep Them
It would be easy to call this morbid. I don't experience it that way. Nothing about a dead wasp asks to be thrown away with the rest of the week's trash — and resin doesn't erase what something was, it just refuses to let it finish disappearing. The coffin shelf isn't a joke, exactly, though I laugh every time I add something new to it. It's just where these small, finished lives get to rest in a way I can look at.
I don't know if that's craft or ritual. Probably both. It usually is, around here.
If curiosities like this are your kind of strange, come wander the rest of the shop — there's more where this came from.
WhichCraft? Studio creates high-end, heirloom-quality embroidery from a very small, very magical studio on wheels. Spooky yet sophisticated. Always made with intention.
Comments