Marquetry Flower Press

Overview

A working flower press — two rigid boards you tighten down to flatten and dry real flowers — with the top board given over to a marquetry bouquet. The lid is a spray of white lilies and purple irises in oak, walnut and dyed veneers, and the whole thing is a small joke about its own job: I made it as a just-for-fun promposal (“…so PRESSED to prom”).

Handing over the finished press as a promposal at dusk, with balloons and a hand-lettered sign playing on 'so PRESSED to prom.'

The finished bouquet: white lilies with green stamens, two purple irises and a bud, walnut stems and leaves, all inlaid into an oak ground.

Drawing it for the laser

Every petal, leaf and iris is a separate piece of veneer, so the bouquet started as vector artwork — each shape drawn as its own closed path — and was cut on a laser cutter rather than by hand with a knife. (An earlier version of this page said the design files were lost; they weren’t the point anyway — the burnt edges in these photos are the tell that this was laser work, so the vectors existed.) The clip below is me marking out placement on the veneer in the studio.

The laser tracing a lily outline into the taped-up oak and walnut veneer.

Freshly cut veneer pieces with laser-charred edges, still nested in the surrounding sheet.

Taping and gluing it down

Cut veneer is fragile and wants to curl, so the pieces are held face-up with veneer tape — a low-tack paper tape — while the bouquet is assembled. Then the whole thing is glued onto a solid oak ground panel: a household iron does the pressing, and heat through the tape sets the glue and pulls the pieces flat against the board in one pass.

The taped-up lily heads on the cutting mat beside two loose laser-cut iris pieces, edges charred from the laser.

Gluing the veneer down on the shop bench — a household iron sets the glue through the veneer tape, calipers and clamps at hand.

The press itself

The object isn’t just a decorated panel — it’s a real press. Two thick plywood boards sandwich together on four threaded rods, and wing nuts draw them down to squeeze whatever’s between them. So the marquetry lid is also the working top of the tool.

Side on: the two thick plywood boards and four threaded rods that make it an actual press.

The panel closed up as a working flower press — boards drawn together on threaded rods and wing nuts.

Finishing

Once the glue cured I sanded the face flush, peeled the veneer tape, and sealed it. With the tape gone the woods do all the color work — the cool white of the lily petals against the warm oak, the dyed purple of the irises, the walnut stems.

The finished flower-press lid in warmer light, the veneer sealed and the tape long gone.

Veneer tape laid across a sheet of veneer to hold the grain together before cutting.

More veneer tape webbing the sheet so the packet stays flat and intact through the laser.

The laser head cutting the iris and leaf shapes out of the veneer.

The assembled bouquet — white lily petals with yellow stamens, walnut stems and leaves, iris shapes in a darker wood — laid into the oak ground.

The finished panel next to the scorched laser template offcut — the negative the pieces were cut from.

Looking down on the assembled press; the wing nuts tighten the two boards to flatten whatever's pressed between them.

Why a flower press

A press is a good gift object: it’s useful, it lasts, and it quietly keeps giving — you press flowers from an occasion and keep them. The constraint was real, too — it had to actually clamp and hold flat, not just look like a plaque, which is why it ended up as plywood, rods and wing nuts under a marquetry face rather than a solid decorative panel.

The promposal

It was, in the end, a just-for-fun promposal — no grand romance, just a good pun and a handmade thing to go with it. A flower press, so the ask wrote itself: “so PRESSED to prom.”