Details about the binding by Jenni Grey:

“This bouquet of a book was inspired by Neale Albert’s flower photographs, which he sent every day to his friends during the dark days of Covid.” 

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This is a lovely concertina format miniature book, but unfortunately the copy I received was rather wonky.  After taking one section apart and re-gluing it, which only made a marginal difference, I could see myself in a similar situation to the proverbial example of cutting the legs off a table, and thought it was best to stop before I gave myself a problem!  My solution was to make a binding larger than the book to disguise its uneven edges, and as soon as I’d made that decision the idea of creating a binding structured like a flower press followed quite quickly.

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The hardest things to resolve were the brass fittings.  A flower press is usually held together with wing nuts and bolts.  However, they could have become a visual distraction as the embroidered panel should be the main focus of the piece.  So the challenge was to make something that didn’t overwhelm the design, but was still easy to handle, and a number of tests had to be made before finding a good balance. To protect the book pages from damage the endpaper has been glued to the lower board.

 

The materials used were lemon wood for the frame, the silk panel has seed beads surrounded by hand-made cabochons and goldwork embroidery. The brass fittings were made by Anthony Belfield.