How Whispers of the Wild Came to Be

I didn't set out to start a studio. I was refinishing furniture — which, if you've ever done it, you know eats up every spare hour you have and then asks for more. Somewhere along the way I started decoupaging pieces too, layering paper and images onto furniture the same way I'd sand and stain it, just another texture to work with.

Then one day I saw a few photos online of people doing decoupage on bottles — actual art, wrapped around glass, turned into something that looked nothing like where it started. And I thought, simple as that: I can do that.

I could not, in fact, do that. Not yet.

My first attempt was bad. Not "needs some tweaking" bad — genuinely, straight-into-the-trash bad. I won't even try to describe it to you. Some things are better left in the past.

But I tried again. And again. The next few were... fine. Reasonably okay. Nothing I was embarrassed by, but nothing that made me feel like I'd actually figured anything out either. I hadn't connected the dots yet. I just didn't know what I didn't know.

Turns out the thing I was missing was blending. It sounds so simple typing it out now, but it took me a while to really get there — to understand how to make the colors and textures move into each other instead of just sitting on top of the bottle like they'd been pasted on (which, to be fair, they had been — that was kind of the point, I just didn't know how to make it not look that way).

And then one day, it clicked. I don't know exactly which bottle it was or what I did differently, but something shifted, and suddenly the pieces I was making actually looked like what I'd been picturing in my head the whole time.

That's really the whole story. No dramatic moment, no lightning bolt — just a woman who liked refinishing furniture, saw something online that looked interesting, ruined a bottle, ruined a few more (less badly), and then kept going until it stopped being ruined.

Whispers of the Wild Studio grew out of that — out of every bottle I got wrong before I got one right. I think that's part of why I love making pieces that tell a story. Every one of them is one of a kind, the same way that first terrible attempt was one of a kind. It just took me a little longer to make the ones worth keeping.

If you've got a piece from the studio sitting on your shelf right now — that bottle only exists because I was stubborn enough to keep trying after the first one went in the trash. I'm glad I did.

— Kim

Whispers of the Wild Studio