Avner Shanan

Mentorship, Software Engineering, Maintenenance and Care

Tin Brood - Ten Years in the Making

Published: Jun 17th, 2026 🕐

My wife and I celebrated our tenth anniversary last year. Did so kind of all year, which was nice. Part of that was a staycation we planned where we did some Chicago-y things together, including a cicada pinning workshop at The Insect Asylum. Being the magppie that I am, and knowing that we were doing this workshop and would be leaving with our own cicadas to pin, I collected material throughout the weekend. Afterwards I put together a shadowbox using the materials!

A black framed shadow box. A square diamond of paper with white and pink swirls of color is in the center, and in the center of that is a large dried mulberry leaf, pointed downwards. Pinned through the leaf are two cicadas with black bodies and bright orange translucent wings. The cicadas face each other like a pair of parentheses, but diagonally from Southwest to Northeast.
A finished 'Tin Brood' sitting on our Newel post shortly before I hung it up. You can see pictures from our wedding just behind it in the background.

The Materials

A Mulberry leaf

We are together and we are ourselves

When we travel, we like to take a day to split up and do our own thing. She usually rents a bike and goes riding, and I like to go to a cafe and read. In order to make the staycation feel more like a vacation we were trying to do something along those lines. I dropped Deana and her bike off at the forest preserves where she was starting her ride, with plans for her to meet me at a cafe later. As I dropped her off I noticed a mulberry tree nearby. Mulberries always make me think of my childhood. Growing up in Chicago it was pretty normal to see them growing over the sidewalk. Being able to grab fruit and eat standing on the sidewalk felt like cheating, somehow, like how could they let us get away with something this awesome?

The Insect Asylum

Beautiful and loud

The cicada pinning workshop! We weren’t the only adults there that weren’t chaperoning children, but we were definitlely the oldest, and I could not have cared less. I had a great fucking time. We learned about insects, I got to do my first taxidermy, and we got to pet a possum! One thing I didn’t anticipate but probably could have is that taxidermy includes long periods of waiting while your specimen(s) dry out. That’s not the reason this post is going up just after our eleventh anniversary, but it is a major reason this project took as many months as it did. These little critters are also where part of the name for this piece comes from. If you’re not familiar with cicadas, they have a very interesting lifecycle where they live underground for a number of years (usually 13 or 17 for periodical cicadas, just a couple years for “annual” cicadas) and then all emerge at the same time. The different cycles of emergence are referred to as broods (e.g. Brood Thirteen).

Lula

Shared history

My wife and I were friends for years before we started dating. For the very first definitely-not-a-date that we went on, we grabbed a bottle of wine, picked up food from Lula Cafe, and went to see The Gypsy Kings at Ravinia. You know, just normal friend stuff. We have enjoyed laughing about this not-a-date over the years, so of course we wanted to go back to Lula on our anniversary staycation. My wife mentioned that we were celebrating our anniversary on the reservation and they were really sweet about it! They printed the date on the menu and gave us a special dessert. That dessert was plated with some fancy paper, and you know I kept both the paper and the menu. The dessert paper is the pink and white backing behind the mulberry leaf.

Stamped Tin Labels

Leaning on community and tradition

These labels, one at the top and one at the bottom, read “Tin Brood” and the date of our wedding, respectively. They’re made of tin, which observant readers will have noticed is also in the name of this piece. Why tin? We don’t normally bother with the traditional anniversary gift materials (we actually don’t usually do anniversary gifts at all, we take each other out on the town instead), but since this was a big anniversary having tin (the ten year gift material) incorporated somewhere was important to me. In addition, these labels were cut and stamped by my brother’s sister-in-law, making this project better with community support. I feel similarly about our marriage—without the friends and family that have supported us in the last ten (eleven, now) years, our lives would not be as good as they are.

Putting it All Together

I started out with some basic sketches, playing around with the largest materials to see what placements felt good.

A rough sketch on dotted graph paper of a square with a diamond in the center. A much simplified version of the real leaf is sketched into the center of the diamond.
An early sketch.

Once I knew, roughly, what the background would look like, I had to figure out how to place the cicadas. Since they’re on the fragile side I didn’t want to try a bunch of different placements with the actual cicadas. I ended up making some templates by eye that I could place (with and without pins) to my heart’s content.

A linen looking fabric covered board with the white and pink square diamond paper from Lula in the center. Pins at each corner are carefully keeping it in place without damaging the paper. A large leaf sits in the center, stem down, with two paper cicada templates facing each other diagonally across it. The shadow box's frame is nowhere to be seen.
A very early mock up.
A black framed shadow box. The square diamond of paper with white and pink swirls of color from Lula is in the center, and in the center of that is a large dried mulberry leaf, pointed downwards. Two paper cicada templates are arranged on either side of the leaf, overlapping it. They are offset from each other vertically as well, with the one on the right higher. Off to the side, on the desk, you can see one of the cicadas pinned onto a scrap of cardboard.
A much later mock up.

I mocked up some labels using our home label maker, then, once I got the final ones from my sister-in-law, glued and clamped the tin ones to the frame.

After it was done drying, that was it. Ready to hang!

A collection of photos on a wall in a stairwell. The shadow box is hanging there as well. There are also two large framed portraits of cats as royalty. The portraits were a birthday present from my wife.
Hanging on the family wall with our wedding pictures and portraits of our cats.
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