I find, as I progress through trying to replicate the flowers, that there are only three items needed to make any flower: silk thread (or floss), wire, and vellum. Any combination of the three can create any number of flower varities. The wire, formed into bullion by coiling it, can be of numerous base metals and coiled in many different ways but it is still only one item. To me this makes perfect sense. All three of these items are pretty easy to come by and take more time than money to produce the finished flower. While I'm sure none of the items were especially cheap even in the early 1500's, the flowers are on a relatively small scale so very little of each item is required. I have found that the average flower requires approx. a 2 or 3 inch square size of vellum, 2 yards of wire, and a five meter skein of silk floss. Moreover, those would be finished amounts, the actual usage can come from much smaller, leftover pieces. As an example, the vellum I'm using is all small bits left over from cutting full pages out of the hide - the pieces aren't large enough for even a page in the smallest book or they are irregular enough to be worthless as such. And while I do use some purchased bullion, I end up coiling most of the wire myself because I can't buy anything as small as I need.

 

The first flower I replicated contained no vellum and was of a type that are currently being made in Malta (and there have recently been numerous books written on the subject, giving instruction) and Europe. The second one contained the same technique as the first, with the addition of the vellum petals. The third one, my latest project, contains very narrow strips of vellum and wire, wrapped in silk and then coiled. It is a most time consumming process but is very simple in its technique. I hope soon to figure out the two last flower types that has so far elluded my ability to recreate them. I will, of course, continue to work on it until I feel I have suceeded.