What are they made from?

When thinking of cactus most of us have a strange-looking spiky plant in mind. Yet, despite their weird figure and the scary spikes, we have a special fond of cactus and we admire their toughness with which they can withstand even the most extreme weather conditions.

But what most people don’t know is that certain kinds of cactus – for example, prickly pear – despite look quite unusual on the outside, hide something beautiful in the inside.

This beauty, however, is not revealed to human eyes until an older segment of the cactus plant naturally dries out, thanks to the powerful effect of rain, wind and sun. After this long process, nothing else remains from the cactus pad than the strong inner fibres or the skeleton of the plant. And these fibres have an amazingly intricate lace-like structure.

When quite a few years ago we arrived on the islands of Malta, and first glimpsed these wonderful formations – the dried segments of prickly pear cactus plants -, we felt seized by its beauty, and immediately knew that we must create something from it. They are just too pretty to be wasted! And not much later we developed the method of preparing them: how to clean them without damaging their delicate structure, how to treat them to make them more durable, and first of all, what to create from them, which would properly enhance the beauty of their structure.

Thus, eventually these cactus skeletons became jewellery in our hands. We are convinced that forming them into jewellery is the worthy way to showcase the excitingly intricate inner structure of this unique plant – cactus as you haven’t seen it before.