The KASHIMA family includes us four, Dröfn, Sigfús, Margrét and Valdís. 

We are creative and for example love to draw and color in our family time. However, we have never taken it further than a family activity. Lately Dröfn has been on a journey to make old dreams come true and taken short classes in drawing, watercolor, design and more. 

The adventure started in the beginning of 2022 when Dröfn was working from home because of the epidemic. Margrét only had a half day of school, so she came home at noon and did not have much to do. To keep her occupied Dröfn suggested she would draw pictures and make cards and sell them. So Margrét started to draw beautiful pictures that Dröfn scanned and printed for her. The pictures were mostly original and not corrected. This small passed time got the ball rolling and now we have a little family business designing and printing all kind of greeting cards. 

The name KASHIMA has a lot of different meaning to us. Sigfús is half Japanese and we lived in Japan for almost two years when there were just the three of us. Dröfn grew up on a small island in Iceland called Hrísey and we wanted the name that connect us all together.

KA (火) means fire and SHIMA (島) means island, together they mean fire island or volcanic island. Japan and Iceland have a lot in common even as they also differ a lot. One of the things they have in common is being volcanic islands. The culture of the two nations also have a lot in common for example, use of natural hot springs, lot of fish eating, long life expectancy and more. A fun coincidence is that Sigfús's family name in Japan is KASHIMA (鹿島), but the meaning is different, it means reindeer. KASHIMA's logo is built from the kanji KA (火) meaning fire in top of an island. 

KAMI (紙) is the Japanese word for paper and we liked the harmony of the words together, KASHIMA KAMI.