I suppose finding beauty in unexpected places has always been my particular love language.
Give me a good yard sale and I’m very happy.
That’s actually how this collaboration began. I found an old mirror at a yard sale on the side of the road in the Cayman Islands. I loved the shape, but more than that, I loved the idea of taking something that had been passed over, and making it feel special again.
I started thinking about how I could bring a little more of the island into it. The sea, the shells, that soft, iridescent quality of mother of pearl. And that’s when I thought of Fellow Earthlings, a local Cayman studio whose work has always caught my eye for their dedication to incredible vintage styles, and how they hand-make everything with equipment that they have personally sourced from all over the world.
I approached them about fabricating a custom frame for the mirror, inspired by mother of pearl and decorated with shell motifs.
I had the vision in my head, but I knew I didn’t want to do it alone. That’s the fun of working with another maker…
A Good Idea Has a Way of Travelling
The mirror became this lovely meeting point between my ideas and Fellow Earthlings’ craft.
We were talking about color, texture and the aesthetic we wanted the piece to have, and somewhere along the way, we started developing a shared visual language.
We looked to the mother of pearl for inspiration, drawing on its soft, shifting colors and natural sheen, and incorporated their shell motif into the design, creating a versatile frame that could be used as a mirror and a decorative piece.
And then, as these things sometimes do, the project wandered off and became something else altogether.
Fellow Earthlings took inspiration from the colors and tones we had been working with and created sunglasses using that same palette. A limited-edition colorway to the CABANA frames are now being sold at Dolores, a concept boutique and lifestyle gift store located in Palm Heights.
I have to admit, a sold out sunglasses collection wasn’t the plan!
The original idea was simply, “I found this mirror. What can we do with it?” And now that conversation has found its way into another object, another space, and another opportunity for local makers.
That, to me, is one of the best things about collaboration. You don't always know what ripple effect you are creating.
Keeping the Circle Local
There is something particularly lovely about this happening in the Cayman Islands. When you work with other creatives here, it rarely feels like a simple exchange of ideas or a one-off project. You get to know each other, share what you’re looking at and thinking about, figure out the little things together and, somewhere along the way, each person usually brings something to the work that the other hadn’t seen before.
I also think there is an important sustainability story here.
Instead of buying something new, I found something that had been discarded and saw an opportunity to give it another life, which felt like a much more interesting place to start.
I often think we put too much pressure on a project to have a beginning, middle and end.
But perhaps it can be more like a conversation.
One person has an idea. Someone else picks it up. They give the idea wings. It travels somewhere new. Another person sees it and thinks, “Oh, I could do something with that”.
That is precisely what happened here.
An old mirror led me to Fellow Earthlings. A mirror frame led to conversations about color and shells. Those conversations led to seriously cool sunglasses. And who knows where those might lead next?
For me, that is the joy of working with other artists and artisans. You put something into the world and let it wander a little. Sometimes it comes back to you in a completely different form, and sometimes it opens a door you hadn't even noticed was there.
And all because of a mirror I happened to find at a yard sale.
Find the sunglasses at Dolores, at the Palm Heights resort on Seven Mile Beach in Grand Cayman. Sorry if you can’t find them as they could be sold out!