I Make Things
Elegy & Ivy didn’t begin as a business idea. It started as something I did often enough that it eventually needed a name. When I visit a new place, my first stop is usually the historic cemetery. I read stones. Names. Dates. The spacing between them. It didn’t register as research at the time, but it added up.
Cemeteries offer a kind of historical access that museums don’t. They’re intimate by default. Each marker is shaped by whoever was left behind, then revisited, cleaned, neglected, or eventually forgotten. Walking cemeteries became a way to recalibrate. When everything feels urgent, it helps to stand among people who once felt the same way and eventually stopped.
The shift from interest to inevitability happened during lockdown, when time stretched and hobbies either disappeared or took over entire rooms. A year earlier, I’d been experimenting with Halloween props and competitive costume making. During lockdown, that turned into gravestones made from recycled shipping materials and discarded food packaging. They were small, awkward, and aggressively trying their best. Their epitaphs were earnest. Their moss was ordered online. Looking back, they’re hard to defend. At the time, I was proud anyway.
What set those early pieces apart was intent. Fonts and motifs mattered. Accuracy came first, even when the materials didn’t cooperate. For a long time, this wasn’t a business so much as a hobby that kept saying yes when it should have said stop. The scale increased. The tools multiplied. Storage disappeared. At some point, the garage and the backyard were no longer negotiable spaces. Along the way, trial and error, paired with research, refined the materials and methods until the results were convincing enough to withstand both weather and scrutiny.
The audience is self-selecting. Halloween people understand immediately. Others do not, and that’s fine. Despite appearances, Elegy & Ivy isn’t about death so much as what’s left behind, and giving difficult things somewhere to go. About spending time with what would otherwise be avoided, until it feels a little more manageable.
I make things. If Elegy & Ivy didn’t exist, I’d still be making something. Most hobbies burn out quickly. This one didn’t. So I kept building, and here we are.
