The place I wish
existed when I started.

Hi, I'm Rae.

I'm a mom, wife, artist, designer, animal lover, and an obsessive researcher. I'm also extremely sentimental. I save things because they mean something to me, notice tiny details, and ask a million questions.

Once I get interested in something, there is basically no such thing as casually interested.

I'm also a Scorpio, so maybe becoming obsessed with creepy little preserved things was inevitable.

And yes, I know scorpions are arachnids. Don't come for me.

Why Pretty Dead Things?

My health became unpredictable enough that I started thinking about something I never expected to be thinking about at this point in my life.

If this ever took a serious turn, how would my kids remember me?

Not just pictures or things I owned. I mean me. My voice, humor, creativity, the weird things I love, the things I taught them, and the things I made with my hands.

I wanted to build something that would hold pieces of me.

Around the same time, I became fascinated with preservation.

There was something beautiful about taking something that had already lived its life and deciding it was still worth caring for.

This existed. It was beautiful. It mattered. Let's take care of it.

Then I found insect preservation and, predictably, became completely obsessed.

I wanted to know everything. Where specimens came from. How they were raised. Why wings tore. Why certain techniques worked. How museums preserved insects for decades. Which supplies actually mattered. Why ten people could give ten different answers to the same beginner question.

If something doesn't make sense to me, I will research it until it does.

But I'll also always tell you when I'm wrong. I'm never going to pretend I know everything because I'm the one teaching you. If I get something wrong, I'll correct it. If I find a better way, I'll show you. If I completely fuck up a specimen trying something new, you'll probably see that too.

I don't need you to think I'm always right. I want you to know you can trust me to care about getting it right.

And now I'm building it

Here's the funny part.

I know how to make things. I know how to design. I know how to research the absolute shit out of something.

Being a content creator? Very new.

I'm learning how to film, edit, talk to a camera without suddenly forgetting how human speech works, build websites, set up automations, understand algorithms and figure out why the link I swear I just fixed is somehow broken again.

I'm learning all of this while I'm doing it.

So if you're here early, you're going to see it happen in real time. The videos will get better. The collection will grow. There will be insects raised here, new things to learn, classes, experiments, mistakes, kids in the background, animals everywhere, ideas that work and probably some that absolutely do not.

I hope you stick around long enough to get to know me and watch Pretty Dead Things become whatever it's going to become.

Because I don't want to build something that just has followers. I want people here who are curious. Who share what they know. Who ask questions. Who aren't afraid to admit when they don't know something.

People who can look at something they once thought was creepy and get close enough to realize it's actually fucking incredible.

And someday, I want my kids to be able to look back at everything I built here and find pieces of their mom everywhere.

My health made me think about what I would leave behind.

Pretty Dead Things made me realize I don't have to wait to leave it.

I can build it now.

So that's what I'm doing.

I'm glad you found me this early.