The idea of the Anniversary Collection came to me one afternoon when I was sipping on some tea, and taking a break from my long day. I left my office and went out to our living room to check on our two cats, Petal and Rose.

I knew I wanted to make a collection that celebrates S-kin truly for where it started - me, a 21 year old that asked herself, 'But what if I fail?', and went for it anyway.

So I started sketching, at first, just the beautiful nature illustrations that appealed to me. Funny story actually, our Tulip Etched Necklace was the final choice between three different designs that I narrowed down to. I wanted to create a floral arrangement necklace (if you know me or have been to my home, I'm always collecting and drying flowers as a hobby) to compliment our Rose Petal Etched Necklace. The three choices were the tulip, which symbolizes self-love; the rose, which symbolizes romance; and billygoat weed, which was a type of flower that was very apparent in my childhood. Well, the rose was slightly 'too cliche', and the billygoat weed was, well, a weed, so I went for the universal self-love symbol, the tulip.

Making the pearl pieces were easy - once I found the perfect pearls, I set to design 'something nostalgic' - yes, that was my design brief to myself - to pair with the beautiful vintage pearls that I secured. I encountered another design roadblock, which was that the pearls were already drilled with holes too small for my design. So I found a way around it and redrilled the pearls with larger holes to fit our safety pin designs.

The majority of this collection was handmade, so I spent a lot of time after hours at my desk getting them ready for our shoot. After many hours, a sore back, and blurry eyes, I managed to finish them in time. Then we drove that night with me hugging all my loose pieces of jewellery to Castlemaine, where we shot our campaign photos the day after.

Our Anniversary Collection shoot took place in Castlemaine, a beautiful country Victoria town north of Melbourne. We wanted to demonstrate where the very idea of S-kin came from, which was country living. We shot our campaign shots at a relaxed barn house, with a particular focus on a slow living feel. 

Here are a few images from the shoot in the behind the scenes! There's quite a few videos on our Instagram and Facebook as well, if you'd like to see the mess that it was on the day, haha!

Photos were shot by our amazing photographer, Tuscany Gray. Our model, Ella, was also a delight to work with. Of course, my fiance Alex also helped our shoot immensely, and was my 'consultant' throughout the making of our collection as well!