There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of building a shadowbox, when it stops being a collection of objects and becomes a place.
The Witch's Library series started with a question: what would a witch keep on her shelves? Not the obvious answer — not just spell books and crystals — but the real answer. The obsessive answer. The answer that includes a mouse skull in a glass dome, a fragment of a bird's ribcage, a carved pumpkin no bigger than a thumbnail, and a luna moth with wings the colour of old spells.
The answer that takes days to build.
The frame comes first
Every piece in the Witch's Library series begins with a hand-built frame. Dark wood, cut and assembled by hand, lined with velvet — green, black, deep and specific to each piece. The frame is not a container. It is an architecture. The shelves inside are built to hold a world, and the world is built to fill them.
This takes time before a single object is placed.
Then: the decisions
How many shelves? Where does the main specimen go — the moth, the tarantula, the lantern bugs? What is the background? What goes on the top shelf versus the bottom? What is the first thing the eye finds, and what does it discover next?
A single shadowbox involves hundreds of these decisions. Most of them are made, unmade, and made again. The luna moth in The Librarian was repositioned multiple times before she was right. The crystals in The Alchemist were tried in four different arrangements. The ouija board in The Archivist was almost left out entirely.
It stayed. It was right.
The specimens
Every insect, skull, and bone in the Witch's Library series is real and ethically sourced. This matters — not just ethically, but aesthetically. There is a quality to a real luna moth that cannot be replicated. The way the wings catch light. The texture of the eyespots. The specific green that is not quite any other green.
Working with real specimens means working carefully. They are fragile. They are irreplaceable. Each one is handled with the attention it deserves.
The details no one sees at first
This is the part that takes the longest and shows the least — immediately.
The miniature scrolls. The tiny spell books with their illegible spines. The star anise placed just so. The lace on the back of the frame that no one sees until they turn it over.
These details are not for photographs. They are for the person who owns the piece and lives with it — who notices, one morning, something they had not seen before. A small skull behind a larger one. A crystal tucked into a corner. A dried flower that has been there all along.That is what makes a world, rather than a display.
How long does it take?
Longer than it looks. Always longer than it looks.
A piece like The Librarian — with its luna moth, its illustrated background, its shelves full of curiosities, its hand-built frame and hand-cut glass — represents days of work. Not continuous days, because some things need to dry, some decisions need to be slept on, and some arrangements need to be seen with fresh eyes before they are right.
The finished piece looks inevitable. It was not. It was chosen, carefully, out of a hundred other possibilities.
Why it matters
Because the world has enough things that were made quickly.
Every piece that leaves this studio was made slowly, with attention, with the specific intention that it should be worth looking at for a long time. That it should reward the person who looks closely. That it should feel, when it arrives, like something that was made for them — even though it was made before they existed.
That is what a tiny world is for.