I started with a 5x7 hardcover, spiral-bound notebook. I took the image of an astrolabe rete, extracted a 5x7 section of it, and converted it to black and white for the silhouette.
I pasted it to a double-thick piece of old file folders, the two layers also glued together, and cut out the shapes with an X-Acto knife. Painfully slow, that was.
Once done with that, I sprayed it gold, then gave it a faint haze of brown to give it some age.
For the plate section, I cut out a 5x7 piece of foil-faced paper and drew a bunch of arcs on it more or less at random with a silver marker. The marker was far too large to fit in the compass, so I had to wire them together.
With both pieces done, I stacked the two pieces together. The foil piece was a little bigger than the cardboard rete, so I had to trim it down a bit.
To prepare the piece for a little more dimensionality, I drilled a quarter-inch hole in the bottom corner.
That was just a preparatory step, though. To make sure everything would line up, I glued the foil paper to the notebook, then the file folder layer to the foil.
For the center, I nailed a hole through all three layers and used a fancy paper brad in the center, then glued a plastic jewel to a piece of paper and glued that over the hole in the lower corner.
Finally, it was just a matter of putting a grommet through the hole in the lower left and covering it with a watch gear, through which the red jewel can be seen from the right angle, and cutting a notch in the upper right so another fancy paper brad could be installed.
