• Welcome to the Framer's Corner Forum, hosted by the Professional Picture Framers Association. (PPFA)
    You will have to register a free account, before you can SEARCH or access the system. If you have already registered, please LOG IN
    If you have already registered, but can't remember your password, CLICK HERE to reset it.

What are some of the most fun, interesting, or ODD things that you have framed?

Mike Labbe

Forum Administrator
Forum Help Team
Messages
4,199
Location
Lincoln, RI
Company
Get The Picture
Since everyone is being shy, I'll try to start an interesting discussion.

What are some of the most interesting, important, or even the ODDEST things that you have framed during your career?

This should be a fun topic! :)

Mike
 
Living in a university town with a medical college I never know what is coming through the door. I guess the most interesting and challenging piece I recieved was a complete and intact artificial knee that was given to an orthopedic physican as a retirement gift.
 
Ron, that is just plain weird. I framed on of those for a surgeon not very long ago. Mylar strips were my friend.

My hardest job to date was to frame two 7 x 8 ft paintings on-site. They were not square and it was a 4" ornate moulding with no give. On that job math was my friend. I was still sweating it when I got to the 4th corner on each of them.

Smallest job I ever did was a 1 1/2 x 1 1/2" shadowbox without glazing to serve as a ring holder. I liked it myself, so I made another to hold my ring whenever I enter the cutting room.
 
I'm seeing a trend here Ron and Greg.

A boss' hip was replaced and his employees thought this would be a great gift.
The parts were not surgical grade. And yes, I used gold spray paint on them.
5" deep.

Fun job!

226728162460199319_hmdHtL4P_f.jpg
 
Chunk of Drywall

I mounted and framed a broken chunk of drywall last Christmas. I didn't keep a picture of it. It was found during a remodeling job and had handwritten notes from the customer's father some 40 years ago.
 
There's a bit of a story about this piece. In September 2010, Mike and I went on a European cruise for 12 days. One of the places we visited was Egypt. We visited Saqqara and the site of the Stepped Pyramid of Djoser. The nearby temple complex is a wide open space, with lots of sand (of course) and small rocks. We happened across a small piece of what looks to be red granite, with marks on it that looked almost like hieroglyphs. It was very cool, but unlikely to be anything significant, as the rock is very tiny. While touring the site, I carried the rock around with me, kinda just fidgeting it while I walked around. Kinda forgot to drop it, and the rock ended up coming home with us. When I found it later, I knew I wanted to put the rock together with a picture of the pyramid, and I wanted it to be something that really captured the feel of where it came from. This is the result.
pyramid3.jpg


Side view too:
pyramid1.jpg


Sorry so large. Couldn't figure out how to resize them locally, and was too lazy to open up PhotoShop. :)
 
Well, the key thing to remember here is that because I was doing this for myself, I wasn't exactly going for archival quality of any sort here. I wanted something that evoked the texture and weathered appearance of the pyramid in the photo, and give the rock itself an "appropriate" setting.

Both the frame and the mat were made in more or less the same way. The frame size is 11x11 inside the rabet. I cut some scraps of NC91201 Cosmopolitan gold to size and built it. I then cut NC61502 Chantilly silver so that the back edge of the first frame sits right on the top of the sloped edge of the second frame. Then both frames were attached with glue and offsets to make one frame. No pics of that, since it's pretty cut and dry (pun intended). Once the frames were together, I needed to make the brick design. I tried a couple of different things, like trying to cut v-grooves by hand, or making bricks on the Wizard. Making a ton of little bricks on the Wizard would have taken forever, so I opted to go a quicker route. I cut 1/4" strips of a slightly textured rag matboard, then cut those strips into 1/2" bricks with an old paper cutter. The bricks were then glued, one by one, to the frames, as pictured below:
step01.jpg

Once all the "bricks" were glued in place, I sealed them with Modpodge to make sure they were good and attached to the frame, and make sure that the matboard would be able to take the following steps. I think I used maybe three or four coats of the Modpodge, and really tried to fill in some of the major gaps. Picture below:
step02.jpg

Once the sealing coat was dry, I was ready to add the texture. I picked up a can of Krylon's Make it Stone spray paint from the craft store, and coated the entire frame with a couple of coats, letting it dry about an hour between the coats.
step03a.jpgstep03b.jpg

After letting the final coat of spray paint dry a few hours, I painted over the textured paint with a yellow acrylic paint. The color is called Camel, but it's really more of a dark butter color. Now it was really starting to look "right."
step04.jpg

Can only include five images per post, so to be continued. . .
 
Continued. . .

I let the various paint layers dry over the weekend. When I came in on Monday morning, I mixed up a stain of burnt umber acrylic thinned with water. I brushed the stain over the entire frame surface, letting the dark paint settle into the pits and crevices between the bricks to define and "age" them. Think I did about three coats of the stain, dabbing lightly with a paper towel, until I got the depth of color I was looking for.

One coat of stain:step05a.jpg and with final coat of stain:step05b.jpg

After that, it was just cosmetic touches. To highlight the raised parts of the texture, I used the same base color yellow paint, and just did a light dry brush to make those parts stand out. Once that was completely dry, the frame was sealed with a couple coats of Krylon matte spray.
step06.jpg
The mat was done pretty much the same way, just without making bricks. I knew I wanted the mat to more or less blend in with the un-bricked panel on the face of the frame, but still wanted something to make it stand out. So I cut the Eye of Horus designs with the Wizard's cut art, and glued those to the face of an 8-ply rag mat. Then the mat was sealed with Modpodge, textured with the spray paint, and stained. Voila!

Mat, pre-staining:step07.jpg

The photo was drymounted to a piece of Restore. A small box was design and cut on the Wizard, then painted with the same steps detailed above to make a small niche for the stone to be displayed. The stone was then mounted in place with silicone (remember, not going for archival here!). I opted to use Museum Glass with 1/8" spacers to make sure the texture of the mat really stood out. This is definitely one of my favorite pieces I have designed for myself.
 
Andy, that is really impressive. Thanks for sharing the details. Don't tell Jim Miller, but I probably would have used silicone for something I was doing for myself.

If you hadn't told me, I would never have believed that was a painted mat. It is just stunning.
 
Andy, That is a very creative use of common materials to make something truly unique and stylish. You should submit it to FMO for an article. Or, for money, send it to PFM.
But don't mention the silicone.
:tape:
 
Hey Andy, Would you mind posting that in the Design Forum?
It's public and this is the kind of stuff we want the non-members and search engines to bump into.
 
Wow, Andy, that is gorgeous! What a wonderful memory.

Weirdest thing: A shirt, covered in blood with a bullet hole through it. It was worn by an artist that shot himself through the heart. Disgusting. No photos allowed.

Another weird thing: a 3' x 3' piece of wood paneling from a wall. To me it looked ordinary, but to the people getting it framed it looked like a cow's head in the grain of the wood, and when their daughter ws little, she evidently spotted it and named it. Now, she was grown and getting her first home, so her parents ripped out the piece of panelling, cut it down and had us frame it. It was a sweet thought. Personally I'd prefer a small kitchen appliance....
 
Andy Langlois said:
...Sorry so large. Couldn't figure out how to resize them locally, and was too lazy to open up PhotoShop. :)

That's OK Andy,

Your techie partner can come back later and downsize these for you. :nod:

John
 
Okay Mike's been bugging me to add this one. Finally found the original photo that I took when it was done, just before doctoring for our webpage. Here it is, probably the weirdest thing I've framed so far:

leg_bones.jpg

Customer called the shop, asking if we framed unusual things. After telling him we would frame pretty much anything, he promised to be right down. Came in fairly late in the day, and had something weird wrapped up in a zip-loc bag. Looked like a piece to a frame for a license plate. Turn out to be a surgical steel bar and 6 screws, which were recently removed from his 17-year-old son's leg. The son had broken his leg in a snowmobiling accident in March of 2007, and had just recently had the bar removed and wanted to frame it up to commemorate the "event." They wanted it to be light hearted and fun, so we came up with the idea of making the framing look like an X-ray. We designed the bone shapes on the Wizard, then cut the mats. The black top mat is one of the shiny surfaced black mats that has just come out around that time, and the inner mat was a pale grey. We were able to find a picture of the exact model snowmobile online, and printed it on our Epson printer. All the metal pieces were sewn in place with invisible thread, and the framed in one of Larson Juhl's Confetti frames, the black with orange trim to match the colors of the snowmobile photo. Came out awesome, and the customer loved it.
 
Back
Top