Assembled over time · Indianapolis, Indiana
The odd beautiful thing that refuses to fit anywhere else.
Curated by Kate Ellis.
A cabinet of curiosities — in the original sense — was not a tidy thing. It was an accumulation. Objects gathered because they were interesting, beautiful, strange, or important to the person who kept them. No single thesis. No apologetic curatorial statement. Just: here is what I find worth keeping.
This cabinet contains living plants and their color histories. Photographs of people and places. Family lines traced across three centuries and two continents. Questions about how people communicate and why they so often fail to. Music, instruments, books in every room. History — more history than there is space to describe. The stories embedded in objects that have already lived a life.
Explore by room, or wander. Either approach is correct.
Coleus — Solenostemon scutellarioides — is the primary specimen. The range of color, pattern, and texture available within this single genus is staggering: burgundy velvet, neon chartreuse, watercolor blends, deep chocolate with pink edges. I've been growing and selling coleus for years, and I still encounter varieties that stop me completely.
The collection doesn't stop there. Cacti and succulents occupy their own corner — chosen for the same reasons as coleus: unusual form, interesting pigment, the kind of specificity that rewards paying attention. The occasional other plant makes its way in when something is too interesting to pass up.
I grow, propagate, and sell through Kate's Plant Shop — primarily non-patented varieties chosen for unusual color expression and form. Shipping is a craft in itself: serious research goes into every method, material, and timing decision to get plants to buyers in excellent condition.
The color work grew out of the plant work. Over several years I built a database of 88+ coleus varieties — catalogued, cross-referenced, and mapped by hand to Werner's 1814 Nomenclature of Colours, the same pigment naming system Darwin carried on the Beagle. Each entry covers color description, current sellers, care requirements, and propagation data. That database is the source material for the Coleus Color Book currently in development.
Color is not decoration. It is information, history, and argument. Every pigment has a name, a source, a moment when someone decided this particular shade mattered enough to distinguish from its neighbors. Patrick Syme did this in 1814, adapting Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours into the first systematic color naming system with physical specimens. Darwin carried a copy on the Beagle. It is still the most honest color system ever made.
The coleus database grew out of trying to describe color accurately across 88+ varieties. “Purple” doesn’t work. “Purplish-red” doesn’t work. What works is a system with names precise enough to point at a color and say: there. That one. That is what this is. The Color Codex is the ongoing effort to build that system, extend it, and make it usable.
This room will grow. Swatches. Palette collections. Studies in historical pigment. The design work that grew out of the color work. The visual thinking that connects botanical art to illuminated manuscripts to Art Nouveau to the question of what colors are actually for.
Kathryn Ellis Photography & Design has been operating since 2007. Two lanes: services done for others and products made once and sold many times. They draw on the same underlying skills — visual precision, clear communication, knowing what a file needs to look like before it goes anywhere.
Photo and document restoration is work I find genuinely meaningful. A damaged photograph or deteriorated family record carries whole histories inside it. Bringing it back requires understanding what was there before you can reconstruct it.
The Website in a Weekend template came out of years watching people with real businesses fail to connect online because building a site felt impossible. The Gumroad products — guides, checklists, planners, content frameworks — exist for the same reason: make the useful thing and put it somewhere people can find it.
The canary in the coalmine is not a metaphor for pessimism. It is a metaphor for sensitivity — the quality of noticing what others haven’t named yet, absorbing signals before they become legible, understanding systems by the way they feel before they can be described. That’s useful. It also has costs. This room is for both.
Human dynamics, workplace communication, the gap between what people say and what they mean. Pattern recognition as a skill, as a burden, and as a way of moving through organizations that were not designed with you in mind. The full field guide lives in Read the Room. The visual model of how information actually moves lives in Signal & Noise. The essay about what it costs to be the one who knows first lives in The Canary.
This room will expand. More essays. More models. More of the specific language that makes the invisible visible.
On being the one who knows first — the cost of sensitivity, and why it matters more than it hurts.
Read the essay →A practical field guide to workplace dynamics — terrain, cognitive biases, and self-advocacy for people who notice things others don’t.
Open the field guide →A star atlas of cognitive biases — mapped, named, and charted for the people who need to see them clearly.
Open the atlas →News stories that became the only thing anyone was looking at — how collective attention forms, locks, and eventually releases.
Open the collection →A visual model of how information actually moves through an organization — versus how it’s supposed to.
View the model →The universe tends to unfold as it should.
Read more →A room for work in progress — books, color, art, and the thinking behind all of it. Some of these things exist. Some are underway. Some are ideas with enough conviction behind them to deserve a shelf.
The influences here are as real as the work. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement — the philosophy that the handmade object is a serious thing, that beauty is not decorative but essential, that one person working with intention is a legitimate way to make something worth keeping. Art Nouveau's obsession with botanical form as structure, with the vine and the leaf as architecture. The illuminated manuscript, where color was ground from raw pigment and applied with a brush to vellum by someone who understood that a book was also an object.
These are not just aesthetic preferences. They are arguments about what making is for.
Recovering genuinely interesting Victorian and early-twentieth-century texts from Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive — formatting them for reading, annotating where useful, building microsites around the ones that deserve it. Flora's Feast, Talks About Flowers, a comprehensive fairy art book. More to come.
Products designed and listed through Printify — shirts, notebooks, stickers, hooded blankets, coasters, tote bags. Books published through Lulu. The full range from wearables to published works, without a traditional publisher or inventory.
A guided reading journal for people who keep plants and read books — because those two things belong together and no one has quite said so yet. Genre-to-plant pairings, botanical art throughout, space for notes that are both horticultural and literary.
The movement that said the handmade object is serious, that beauty is not ornamental, that one person working with intention makes something worth keeping. Morris's Kelmscott Press — where he designed every typeface, every ornament, every border — is the closest thing to what the Scriptorium is trying to be. Art Nouveau's botanical obsession connects to the plant work. The illuminated manuscript's use of pigment connects to the color work. More to say here. Come back.
Genealogy is detective work with higher stakes — because the mystery is your own story. I've been tracing the Ellis, Polhemus, and Conard family lines through census records, vital records, land documents, and the occasional surprising discovery that reframes everything that came before it.
What keeps me coming back isn't the accumulation of names and dates. It's the moments where a person becomes real: a handwritten letter, a suspiciously specific occupation, a migration pattern that raises more questions than it answers. The Polhemus connection surfaced through a single phonetic mangling — a census taker wrote "Plaemus" in 1850 and the thread went cold for years. The Conard line leads back to German Quakers who signed the first anti-slavery petition in American history in 1688. Neither of these leads was obvious.
This is heading toward a properly written family history — not a database printout, but something that does justice to people who didn't leave many records, in a time when records weren't equally kept for everyone.
A curated shelf rather than a complete inventory. The Reading Room collects books that have done something — changed a frame, supplied a word for something previously wordless, or simply stayed in the mind longer than books are supposed to. Shelved by subject: history, science, language, biography, fiction, and an expanding section of Project Gutenberg discoveries.
The public domain shelf is its own project. There is an enormous amount of genuinely good writing sitting in Gutenberg — not just famous works but odd, specific, useful books that no one has looked at since the nineteenth century. The digitized editions and the curated reading shelf share this room. The working notes live here too.
Writing is how I think. The reading list and the thinking list are the same list.
A Victorian flower garden guide serialized in the Boston Journal. Twenty-eight chapters including a remarkable Coleus essay written in the voice of the plant itself.
Open the book →The first serious scholarly dictionary of Victorian street language. Annotated for the modern reader with 80+ entries and etymological notes.
Browse the dictionary →28,000+ aphorisms, proverbs, and maxims from ancient and modern sources. Every entry unlocks a layered AI annotation — a cryptic clue, historical context from 1893, and a precise modern echo.
Open the dictionary →An 1922 address recovering forgotten heroines of Pennsylvania history — Mary Jemison, Regina Hartman, Molly Pitcher, and others lost to the historical record.
Read the address →A masque in which every flower becomes a theatrical character. Annotated microsite in development.
In development — coming soonVictorian fairy art and the inhabited natural world — folklore roots through Richard Dadd to the Cottingley hoax. Microsite in development.
In development — coming soonEvery flower, herb, and plant named across the Shakespeare canon. Forty illustrated plates by Walter Crane, with contextual annotations on each quotation and Elizabethan plant lore.
Open the microsite →A brief history of humankind. Changes how you see nearly everything.
The two systems behind every decision.
The definitive guide to typography. What a well-made book looks and feels like.
Four plants, four human desires. How the apple and tulip shaped history.
What a photograph is, and what it means to be stopped by an image.
A cabinet of curiosities in book form. Endlessly re-readable.
Everything here is free — not free trial, not free tier with asterisks. Free as in you can use it without paying, and in many cases without making an account. The full indie creator toolkit: text and reading, images, vectors, type, design tools, publishing infrastructure, web, research, audio, and productivity.
Every entry has a description of what it’s actually good for and an honest account of its limitations. No tool is perfect. Knowing the cons up front saves time. There’s also a section on copyright — why it matters, how to navigate it, and what it means when your own work gets taken.
Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, Open Library, Google Books
Wikimedia, Smithsonian, NYPL, Pixabay, Flickr CC
SVG Repo, Noun Project, Vecteezy, unDraw
Google Fonts, Font Squirrel, League of Moveable Type
GIMP, Inkscape, Canva, Figma, Coolors
Lulu, KDP, Draft2Digital, Printify, Gumroad
Wix, GitHub Pages, Netlify, WordPress, Blogger
Google Scholar, JSTOR, WorldCat, Wikipedia
Free Music Archive, Freesound, Audacity
Obsidian, Notion, Trello, Google Workspace, Evernote
What buying a design actually gives you. DMCA. Etsy and Disney. Your rights when work gets taken.
History runs through every room in this cabinet without belonging to any single one. American, European, social, and design history in the Working Laboratory. Family history in the Ancestral Hall. The history of photography in the Craft Atelier. Victorian material culture in the Bibliotheca. How people ate, dressed, worked, moved, and built things in other centuries — that question never stops. It just keeps turning up in different rooms.
Objects that have already lived a life are more interesting than objects that haven't. I'm drawn to them less for what they are and more for what they imply: who owned this, where it lived, why it was kept, why it was eventually let go. Every estate sale is a whole life laid out on tables. A photograph with names written on the back in a hand that no longer exists. I find that profound and I never stop thinking about it.
Flute and piccolo are my primary instruments — I've played for years. There's always been a piano in my life, and I've worked my way through a number of other instruments over time. Music as practice, not background.
I haunt thrift stores for clothing that has already lived a life. Vintage fashion is where material culture and personal style intersect — each piece is also a document of its era, its manufacturing, and the person who first chose it.