Wedding Album with Raised Celtic Tree of Life
This photo album was created to hold my customer's wedding photographs. She had her photos from her wedding the year before, but had not found a suitable album because she wanted something very personal. This album has 50 pages with room to mount photos on both sides of every page (making the finished book around 2" thick when full of photos). The pages size is a smaller (at least smaller in terms of what people often want for a wedding album) 10" wide by 8" tall landscape format. The cover is dark green pigskin leather over hand-carved binder's board. My customer wanted a very Celtic and slightly "old" look to this book. She wanted a tree of life on the front cover and we settled on the design of a tree with intertwined Celtic knot roots. More carved knots were added at the corners of the front cover. On the back cover, there's a raised pentacle. The recessed circles on the front & back covers surrounding the raised desings help tie the covers together visually, plus I had to make sure that the raised 5-pointed star on the back cover was not raised above the surface since I didn't want it to rock back and forth on this design when laying on its back on a table. For this reason, I created the 5-pointed star as a raised design that is recessed inside the circle The tree on the front DOES stick up above the surface of the cover. This album has raised cords on the spine along with Celtic knots at the top and bottom of the spine stamped in pewter foil using a metal die. Silver lettering was added to the spine (wedding date) and the back cover (the names of the couple). Finally, long leather thong ties were riveted to the back cover that wrap around leather discs on the front to hold the book closed. The discs on the front cover were also stamped with the Celtic knot design. There were many steps to constructing this book as well as many hours spent carving the raised design from the cover boards.
A book like this would cost around $580 mostly because of all the carving involved in this design.
