Material is wood (in good state) covered in I think embossed cardboard (only partly in good state). The inside is lined either in embossed silk or high quality artificial silk which was to a great part in a very poor condition, torn and detached from the sides. Due to the fact that the inside of the lid was in perfect condition and it might be silk after all, I decided to leave it, give it a very good clean and repair what can be repaired; which mainly meant re-glueing the fabric to the sides (a line of book-glue along the top) and adding gold-coloured trim to distract from the fact that in some parts the silk is irreparably damaged.
I forgot to take pictures of the "before"-state, so here's just a glimpse of the process and a few hints for details.
I hardly ever use hot glue for repair works, due to a couple of facts: hot glue is not removable, it's never periodically correct, always visible in some way and it adds volume. Book glue is flexible, becomes almost invisible when dry and is actually removable with a little effort. The tricky thing was to hide the ends of the trim, the absolute perfection being that it takes a second or even third gaze to figure where the trim begins and ends. With cord and book glue it's easy: apply a small dollop of glue to the end and work it in gently with your fingertips until it starts turning transparent and dry. Now you can shape the tip to paintbrush-shape which vanishes nicely behind the similarly shaped beginning.
And you end up with a very neat interior.
The exterior involved still more glueing and pressing because the cardboard covers had turned stiff over time, and especially the corners were beginning to turn up. The whole thing seemed so dry to me that I rubbed transparent shoe wax (the real thing) onto the repaired plates and they turned out like new (except for the missing parts that need to be replaced).
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