Erin has often been sad that the flowers from her bouquet from our wedding weren’t preserved as she’d hoped. While some really are in bad shape, that is not true of all of them.

I’d been recently experimenting with resin in my turnings, and I had an idea to use resin to preserve a few of the buds that had fared better than the others. I took a piece of pear wood that I’d gotten from a local pear tree about a year before, and trued it up between centers to be able to turn a tenon. Once trued up again, I flattened the face so that I could drill a recess off-center.

Then to the casting – I put down a thin layer so that the flowers would be totally encapsulated in resin, before sprinkling a few of these buds on top. Once cured, another layer could be cast on top of it to fully close it in.

With all the resin cured, I remounted it on the lathe, turned a shallow dome shape on the front. After some sanding, I parted it off. Since this was a particularly special piece, I put in the effort to sand the back as smooth as possible before finishing the whole piece.

I was still new to casting at the time, and I got some air bubbles, but I think it was well-received.