Hello one and all, good of you to have looked us up!
The wearable herbariums you see on this site are a cross between Memento mori and Memento vivere, keepsakes from the long-awaited and short-lived Estonian summers [„Vaikelu“ corresponding roughly to „still life“ in English].
We began making these herbariums while at university, grasping at excuses to abandon our language-laden and permanently pixellated workstations to go and prance around the countryside and admire beauty more primal than what the academic world, or, indeed, modern city life has to offer. Vaikelu proved to be the perfect solution. It combines the aesthetical with the ethical, allowing for both creativity and reverent reticence. Over time, the variety of plants we feel honoured and obliged to include in our work has expanded considerably, so that we now like to believe that our herbariums, in some small way, also help further awareness of nature and nurture our familiarity with plant life.
Every piece we make is one of a kind, each stage of production demands care and attention – we pick the plants, use various methods to dry them, make moulds, come up with combinations and compositions, craft the jewellery, package and distribute. This means that our customer is certain to end up with something unique, but also that the piece may sometimes have minor imperfections (which will be visible in the photographs), these we consider to be an eloquent statement of the handcrafting process.
Our ordering process is currently only available in Estonian, but if you’re interested in purchasing a herbarium, do please contact us and we’ll promise to try and work something out (sending a international registered letter comes in at around 4.80-5.68€, whatever your shipping zone; additional customs fees may apply when ordering from outside the EU).
How to take care of your wearable herbarium
The herbariums are made of ecologically sourced synthetic resin, which is lightweight and serves to protect the plant specimens from UV-light. Bearing that in mind:
1. Please try and keep your piece from coming into contact with sharp objects and abrasive materials.
2. While not wearing your herbarium, store it somewhere dark, this helps keep the colours of the plant vivid.
3. When worn on skin for a longer period of time, a sebiferous layer is wont to form on the surface of the smaller herbariums, it can be wiped off with gentle soap, warm water and a soft clean cloth.
4. Please keep your herbarium away from chemically reactive substances.
5. The brass/bronze metal findings will matte and darken over time, this will be greatly accelerated by regular contact with water (and salt water in particular). Silver findings can be polished.
6. Great heat can render the resin impressible – having left your herbarium in the greenhouse on a scorching day, you are implored to not handle it until it cools down.