Our Blog

At home two weeks ago — heaped with bodega flowers for a photoshoot, mineral water, coffee, pastries on the table to eat as we did our jobs together. The part about sweets that I care for far more than the sweets themselves is the poring over them, the nibbling, the crumbs, the cutting and moving from one small plate to the next, the sharing. 

xo Leigh

Since day 1 we have been committed to conscious manufacturing, working with long standing suppliers and partners who offer transparency into the origins of our recycled gold, recycled diamonds, and ethically sourced stones. Today, over 95% of the Catbird line is made using recycled precious materials with no new mining impact. At the heart of what we do is our dedication to preserving our Brooklyn based in-house studio – a centralized manufacturing hub where a majority of the Catbird line continues to be designed and produced. 

What Are Recycled Diamonds? 

A recycled or reclaimed diamond is a diamond that was once mined and used in a jewelry setting, and is ready to be repurposed for another piece of jewelry. Diamonds are the hardest naturally occurring substance which makes them perfect candidates for recycling— they can be used more than once without any trace of wear, holding their original lasting value. 100% of the brilliant cut diamonds we design with are recycled, an industry leading commitment. 

Our Recycled Edit!

Lina is our friend, neighbor, and one of our favorite artists! Everything she makes is moodboard-worthy.
Her dreamy style incorporates a mix of dollhouse miniatures, not-your-average food styling (you may know her from her pastry with bow series), and a nice dusting of magic!
We were excited to commission a photo series from her featuring our new Pastille Collection, a treasure trove of charms, and other favorite Catbird Classics.
Keep scrolling for a peek inside Lina's beautiful mind!

To celebrate the one year anniversary of our second collection with stylist and editor
Leith Clark, we asked her to share some of her favorite things and current inspiration!

For Mother's Day this year, we wanted to spotlight one of the women we have worked very closely with over the past year and a half - the very lovely, Tara!
She is Vito's grandniece, business partner, and caretaker. She is the mother to two beautiful boys, Archer & Jasper.
She is a kind, compassionate, fun, and talented woman, and a very dear friend to us.

Here are a some of her favorite pieces!

We are so excited to launch the newest addition to our best-smelling collection of candles! Say hello to Backyard Garden, Brooklyn.

We developed this candle with celebrated pastry chef & activist (our friend and neighbor!) Natasha Pickowicz, to celebrate her first cookbook, More Than Cake.

Bursting with fresh, green, after the rain feelings - Backyard Garden, Brooklyn is made with notes of tomato jam, candied herbs, and frilly greens. Trust us, it's WONDERFUL!

We spent the afternoon with Natasha in her Brooklyn garden, and we chatted about all things green, cultivating community, bake sales, and More Than Cake.

Join us!

On gardening..

I moved into my little studio apartment in the winter of 2020, when I was spending so much time indoors and was aching for a way to be connected to the outdoors. I had never gardened before in my life; I love cooking and working with beautiful ingredients but never had the space (or time!) to learn how to grow plants. I bought seeds from Crest Hardware and the Union Square Greenmarket; I shopped for heirloom seed online and in boutiques; friends gave me plants and seeds (and advice) of their own. I quickly became obsessed—there's no feeling of accomplishment quite like when you nurse a tomato into ripeness or cut the first cucumber off the vine. It was a pride and joy I had never really experienced before. Of course, there is so much heartbreak that comes with that too—losing plants to invasive bugs, extreme heat, and just bad luck. There's a sense of mystery that I find intoxicating—you can never really know how something will turn out, which makes the changes and discovery that much more thrilling. My book, More Than Cake, came out in mid-April, which is right around the time of year I should be planting and planning for the summer. Because I'll be on tour for the book and traveling quite a bit, I'm going to focus on low-maintenance plants that will thrive without me (and with a little extra help from friends and neighbors)— right now I have bushes of bronze fennel, catnip, lavender, and easy-to-grow flowers like columbine and sweet William. I'll grow less things from seed (when they need more nurturing) and pick sturdy herbs and vegetables that will thrive with waterings every couple of days, like squash, cucumber vines, peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes. And I'll always get to enjoy my annuals (tulips, hydrangea, and daffodils) without any work at all, which amazes me — not to mention the fragrant trees and bushes that line the perimeter of my garden, like lilac, roses, and fig. In the spring, after a long, stuffy winter, I throw open all the windows to my apartment, and the heady scent of the garden drifts right in — it's so romantic and uplifting. 

Tips on hosting..

I think we put so much pressure on ourselves to be the perfect host, the perfect woman, the perfect baker. But perfect is so overrated — what makes events at your home feel unforgettable is when you are present as a host — not stuck in the kitchen preparing something complicated or stressing over a complicated dish, but in and among your friends and family, part of the conversation and the energy. When I host dinner parties in my garden, I do as much of my cooking as possible outside, so I can be near everyone instead of in my apartment . I'll bring out a tray of ingredients and prep vinaigrettes or chop salads right out in the open air, or put friends to work making drinks or setting the table. My friends joke that I do everything tableside, but it's true — I'll barbecue on the grill or premake a braise or stew, so I'm not losing even a single second in the company of my loved ones. 

On candles..

I'm in a group chat called "Candle Conference" with three good friends, haha. We are obsessed with luxury candles and are always texting each other good deals, funny product reviews, and the latest in candle innovation. We have funny hangouts where we'll have a "lighting ceremony" and order pizza and drink wine and talk about how good the candle smells. Backyard Garden, Brooklyn is so special because of the way it conveys the sense of being outside, surrounded by growing things and the earth. The scent is enchanting and floral and softly sweet but a little earthy, too—it makes me think of being outside in my garden, running my fingers through the soil, tending to my plants, harvesting tomatoes, and eating a plate of tomatoes and torn basil with too much olive oil and salt. It feels simple and essential and so evocative for this time of year.

More than cake..

Connecting my pastry work with my relationship to essential non-profit organizations in NYC is the cornerstone of my work and why I do pastry to begin with. I'm all about reinforcing connections, strengthening and deepening the way we see and interact with the world around us. I'm a Culinary Council member at God's Love We Deliver, which prepares nutritious, delicious meals to people who are living with chronic and serious illness in NYC. I've been working for years with the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, a community-based organization that serves people on the East Side of Manhattan — I'll lead cooking classes and birthday parties with their older adults center, develop recipes for their farm-to-institution cooking program the Teaching Kitchen, and fundraise through pastry workshops. I'm on the Junior Board at the Food Education Fund, another terrific non-profit that works with teenagers to empower and prepare them for culinary careers. And through my fundraising bake sales, I've raised over $250,000 between 2017-2023 for organizations that support reproductive access for all, including Planned Parenthood and The Brigid Alliance. I'm deeply grateful that I have a chance to get to know and support the special, vibrant, and joyful people that help the underserved communities of our city. 

& Never Ending Taste!

I've just begun a massive tour for my cookbook, and that includes so many bake sales in cities not just in NYC, but also Washington D.C., Ithaca, NY, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Montreal. It's been such an honor to collaborate with the chefs in cities outside of my own, and have their incredible assistance in bringing these events to life. I'm hoping that when I have more quiet time this summer I'll be able to host more Never Ending Taste pop-ups right here in Brooklyn, where I live — stay tuned! 

We were on the Today Show!

We came, we saw, we ZAPPED! Shop the pieces that were featured at our tiny, shiny shop - made even tinier by the amazing Today Show props team.

And watch the clip of our feature below!

Elif wears her own (archival) Catbird You are My Moon & Stars necklace.  Shop similar styles 

As a small child, I was always writing in a notebook. Adults would say, “My, are you writing a novel? Are you going to write novels someday?” And I’d be like, “Yeah.” I thought that whatever I was writing—my observations about life, or whatever—would automatically segue into novels someday, or that a novel would materialize without my noticing it. It took many years to iron out this misunderstanding. 

I grew up visiting Turkey every summer with my parents. I was the first person in my family to be born in the U.S., so I felt like I existed between Turkey and America in a different way.

I first read Anna Karenina in Ankara, at my grandmother’s apartment, the summer after my second year of high school. I had run out of English books so I was looking for one that would last a long time. I found my mom’s Penguin Anna Karenina, from when she was in high school—she went to an English-language school.

From that first sentence of Anna Karenina—“all unhappy families are unhappy after their own fashion”—I was like, “there’s a book about this?” Tolstoy shows that everybody is right from their own point of view, but also how structurally unfair things were for the women. 

Tolstoy also showed me a possible way to turn all of these contradictions, which could actually be quite scary or threatening, into a beautiful document that’s funny and sad, at the same time. It was also a way to control the narrative. Instead of feeling like a football getting thrown from here to there, I realized, I could turn it into a story—one where I got to be generous and humane and understanding. 

I think a lot of people with immigrant parents are conscious of the dreams their parents didn’t necessarily get to live. In Turkey, an exam determines what university you go to: medical school, business, whatever. Liberal arts education isn’t really a thing. My mom scored really well on the exam, so she went straight to med school at 17. She loves literature, but she didn’t really get to choose. 

When I found out that there was such a thing as novels, and writing them was a job you could have, and that people took it seriously, I was like: “OK, I have to do that.” Nobody in my family told me not to, which I think is unusual.

When I was younger, I wore an evil eye charm most of the time, on either a necklace or a bracelet. In Turkish culture, good fortune always sort of comes with bad fortune, because other people’s envy will invite the evil eye. Whenever I had any bad luck, my mother would say, “Oh, it was the evil eye,” meaning it was because someone else was jealous over some earlier piece of good luck. 

In the evil eye culture, you’re always trying to ward off other people’s envy, which changes your mode of relating to other people, your mode of talking about yourself, and your mode of relating to good fortune.

I think what Selin and Svetlana are attracted to isn’t the model itself, but just the fact that Kierkegaard, a famous philosopher, actually thought concretely about two different ways to live your life, and created a whole unresolvable debate over which was right. If there are two different ways, that means it’s a way for Selin and Svetlana to be free from envy and rivalry. 

By deciding that each has a different way of living, they’re able to tell themselves they’re not actually competing with each other.

While attempting to write a flashback, I unearthed the draft of a book I had written in my mid-twenties, while taking a break from my PhD program. It was a fictionalized version of my own freshman year of college, and it was concerned with the same questions as The Two Lives. Since 20 years had passed since I’d lived it, I could finally see it as a book and not just unmediated reality. That document became The Idiot, which was published in 2017.

When I was trying to write The Two Lives, I thought I was describing a new problem I had encountered only in my 30s. But when I revisited The Idiot, I found this sentence: “I began to feel like I was living two lives.” That’s what made me realize I had to go back and write that book first.