Recent­ly I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work on the most sen­ti­men­tal project I have ever done. If you have been fol­low­ing my page you know that occa­sion­al­ly I do cus­tom work for peo­ple local­ly. The nature of the work can vary whether it’s repaint­ing an old dress­er or cut­ting down an old church pew it almost always involves a type of restoration.

It all start­ed when a child­hood friend of mine came to me with dried flow­ers from her dad­dy and nan­ny’s funer­als. Some had been pressed while oth­ers were wilt­ed in a shad­ow box. She was look­ing for a way to pre­serve the flow­ers for dis­play in her home. Of course I said yes to the chal­lenge imme­di­ate­ly! I knew this would be one of the more del­i­cate projects I had ever been a part of but I knew God had sent her to me on pur­pose and I need­ed to exe­cute this well. 

Based on the brit­tle con­di­tion of the flow­ers we decid­ed that secur­ing them between 2 panes of glass would be the best was to pre­serve the integri­ty of the flowers.

After find­ing the per­fect win­dow I took it to a local glass cut­ting com­pa­ny to have a pane cus­tom cut to fit the shape and size of the win­dow. They also helped me cre­ate a tem­plate to use for cut­ting the hard board that I planned to use for backing.

Once the glass and hard board back­ing were cut to size I was ready to begin the process of arrang­ing the pressed flow­ers. This was prob­a­bly the biggest chal­lenge con­sid­er­ing the brit­tle nature of the flow­ers. I was extra care­ful to pre­serve what I could from her orig­i­nal arrange­ments. As you can see here I was in the think­ing process. I would lay them out, walk away for a bit, and come back to see if what I thought had looked good before had changed. There was real­ly no method here oth­er than cre­at­ing balance.

My orig­i­nal plan after this point was to insert the hard board back­ing, secure with an indus­tri­al adhe­sive and call it a day. I found that some of the flow­ers were too thick for this method to secure the back­ing cor­rect­ly. This is where the bar stock came in. As you can see in this pho­to, we used a 1/8 strip of bar stock,cut to size, and grind­ed until the edges were smooth. (Please ignore the con­di­tion of the walls in my garage)

Next, holes were drilled to size for the the wood screws I was using to secure the bar stock.

Once all the bars were ready for attach­ment I even­ly spaced them across the back of the win­dow. and attached them using 1/2 inch wood screws.

This was the final part of the process, aside from deliv­er­ing this beau­ty to her new own­er. She was thrilled with how it turned out!

“I am in awe of how beau­ti­ful this is! You’ve done such a won­der­ful job at pre­serv­ing some­thing that was so spe­cial to me. Seri­ous­ly I am in tears, it’s so pretty.”

-Sarah W.