Making MossArtum IV

Every piece of preserved moss comes with a small instruction:

Keep it away from direct sunlight.

Do not water it.

Keep the humidity above 40%.

That last line became unexpectedly important.

Back then, we were still making everything on the dining table in our living room. During the winter in Sofia, the humidity inside our apartment often dropped below 25%. Little by little, we noticed that the moss inside our finished pieces was beginning to lose its softness. It became dry and brittle.

We needed a solution.

So we bought a humidifier and turned a tiny storage room into something we had never planned.

Our first gallery.

The walls were covered with every panel we had created. The humidifier quietly kept them at the right humidity while friends who came to visit inevitably ended up standing in that little room, looking at each piece one by one.

That tiny gallery never appeared in a travel guide.

But for us, it was the first place where MossArtum truly existed.

It was also where our first sales happened.

One day, someone asked us a simple question.

"Have you ever heard of Etsy?"

We hadn't.

So I opened a shop.

At first, I was convinced that everything would happen quickly. We had already created ten or so completely different pieces, experimenting with wood, preserved moss and every technique we could think of. Compared to most moss art we found online, our work felt different. Most pieces combined moss with simple wooden frames or natural branches. We were trying to build actual artworks where the moss became only one part of the composition.

I honestly believed people would discover us immediately.

They didn't.

Etsy turned out to be an ocean far bigger than I had imagined.

Being different wasn't enough if nobody could find you.

So another journey began.

I spent countless evenings learning how Etsy worked. There was no AI to ask questions, no shortcuts, no quick answers. Every lesson had to be discovered the slow way—reading, experimenting, making mistakes, trying again. I also discovered that the internet was full of self-proclaimed Etsy experts whose advice sounded impressive but rarely helped our little shop.

Little by little, I learned to separate useful knowledge from empty promises.

I created a Facebook page, experimented with advertisements and slowly, very slowly, people began visiting our shop.

Then, one day, something extraordinary happened.

Someone from Copenhagen bought our geometric cube panel.

There had been no long conversation.

No negotiations.

No special request.

A complete stranger had simply found our work and decided it belonged in his home.

For us, that first order felt enormous.

Until then, our friends had told us they loved our work.

Now someone thousands of miles away was saying exactly the same thing.

A few days later, he left us our very first Etsy review:

"Looks just like in the photos and fits my interior perfectly... 5-star service!"

We must have read those few sentences a hundred times.

They gave us something far more valuable than a sale.

They gave us confidence.

Confidence gave us courage.

Courage to try something we had never seen anyone else make.

We asked our designer, Asena, to imagine a landscape where wood, paint and preserved moss would become a single artwork. She created a beautiful composition inspired by the sea. We had a thick MDF panel carved on a CNC machine into several levels. Then Asena hand-painted every surface with acrylics so it looked like an actual painting instead of a manufactured object. Finally, Victoria and I added two shades of preserved moss to complete the composition.

We simply called it Sea.

It felt unlike anything we had made before.

To this day, I still haven't found another piece quite like it.

Not long after we listed it, someone in the United States bought it.

His review is still one of our favourites.

"I was looking for something to be the centerpiece of my new home office... to invoke peace and tranquility... and I found that and so much more."

We could hardly believe it.

Our most ambitious piece had found a home almost immediately.

And somehow, it had travelled all the way across the Atlantic.

Around the same time, Victoria remembered something she had loved as a child.

Woodcarving.

She found a master carver from the traditional Tryavna school and began taking lessons to rediscover those forgotten skills. Before long, she designed and carved her very first original panel.

It was simple.

Quiet.

Elegant.

The design seemed to reveal itself naturally from the piece of wood she was holding, as if the wood already knew what it wanted to become. When the carving was finished, she felt one small detail was still missing. She added a tiny metal accent to the flower, and together with the moss, the whole composition suddenly came alive.

That little panel became our next Etsy sale.

Another stranger.

Another beautiful review.

Another reminder that people weren't just buying decoration.

They were connecting with the stories hidden inside the wood.

Then came something entirely new.

A woman from Ohio loved our cube panel but wanted it transformed to fit her own home — larger, vertical, and coloured to match her kitchen.

It became our very first truly custom commission.

For the first time, we weren't simply creating something we loved and hoping someone else would love it too.

We were creating something together with another person.

When she received it, she wrote to us:

"The piece is beautiful. I got so many compliments from friends. Your artwork is amazing. We love it."

That sentence stayed with us.

Not because it praised our work.

But because it told us that something we had built at our dining table had become part of somebody else's everyday life.

Soon after, life took us in a different direction.

We bought the old village house where we still live today.

The Etsy shop went quiet for a while as we restored the house, built greenhouses, planted gardens and, most importantly, built our own workshop.

Looking back, that pause wasn't the end of anything.

It was preparation.

When we eventually returned, we were no longer assembling designs made by others.

We had learned to design our own.

We had learned to make our own wooden components.

And, perhaps most importantly...

we had begun to discover our own artistic voice.

📷 Next Chapter

The workshop gave us something we had never had before.

Complete freedom.

For the first time, every idea could begin and end in our own hands.

→ Chapter Five: Finding Our Own Voice