Nothing leaves Bupp Woodworks & Designs that Tina Bupp has not photographed and memorialized herself.

She and her husband, Trevor, spend months ensuring that the pieces are perfect, as are the tables, trays and other woodworking that are often included in the order.

Their medium is resin, and their artistry is encasing flowers from wedding bouquets and funerals as memorials to those occasions.

“We are dealing with things that are irreplaceable,” Tina Bupp said.

For the past eight years, it is also the full-time business for the Johnsburg couple. While Tina is at the workshop in the business condo park at 4306 West Crystal Lake Road in McHenry, Trevor is building the furniture in their Fox River garage outside the city.

Orders for their work come from across the country. Brides ship their bouquets overnight so Tina can start the work of perfectly drying and slowly, meticulously encasing them in resin.

In fact, they ask their brides to book their slot several months before the wedding to ensure their spot in line.

“Our waiting list is a year,” Tina Bupp said. “We prefer to book ahead for weddings. We can only take so many a week.”

She also “saves space” in her schedule so that she can take funeral flower arrangements on an as-needed basis.

“She is always willing to accept a memorial,” Trevor said.

The preservation process starts with the flowers and a plastic box filled with silica sand. The flower is set in the silica to start the drying process that can take two full weeks.

Then Tina arranges the flowers in the mold picked out by the customer or in the table or tray form Trevor has prepared. Once the flowers are placed, she flows in the first, shallow pour of resin, checking for bubbles, hairs and out-of place flowers. She slowly pours layer upon layer, 10 to 15 in total, letting each one set for at least a day before adding the next.

They know what happens when the resin is poured too fast and too deep. It will flash cure – leaving bubbles and overheating the delicate flowers.

“It will warp and burn your flowers and turn them brown and gross,” Tina said.

There are tutorial online, and resin kits are easy to come buy, but those are not the same products they work with. The Bupps beg brides not to attempt to preserve their wedding flowers themselves.

“Once the resin is messed up, it is messed up. There is no going back,” Tina said.

She’s taken calls from brides, crying, after trying to preserve flowers themselves.

“They ask, ‘Can you chisel it out?’” Trevor said. But it’s too late to salvage anything.

The resins, too, are toxic. Tina wears a respirator when pouring the layers. Once mixed, she only has about 40 minutes before the resin starts curing, so she must be careful to make sure each piece is set before.

She started learning how to preserve flowers using the blooms in her own garden. At the same time, Trevor, an electrician and carpenter, was working at a custom cabinetry company but wanted to make his own furniture too.

A neighbor saw Tina’s Facebook post of one her the pieces she’d done for herself and ask if she would do a memorial for her husband who had recently died.

“It started to snowball after that, with a request for another memorial and then a wedding,” Trevor said.

Soon after, “brides were begging me to do their weddings,” Tina added.

With a multi-month wait list, the couple know the next step for the company will have to include hiring more people to help preserve the flowers and pour the resin.

“This is not your everyday small business. This is not selling tires or windows. We made this out of scratch,” Trevor said. “But we could use a bigger team.”

Tina may also have to not personally put every petal in the right place.

“My problem is I don’t give up control,” she admitted.

Their artistry – and the social media marketing Tina has built for them – was recently recognized by their resin provider, iCoat. The Bupps’ “online presence on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram ... has an impressive 112,000 followers, showing significant engagement and reach in the flower preservation and resin art community," according to a news release from the company.