Framed

Still on the road and if things went well, we are somewhere in western New York state by now.

 When we moved into this house some 11 years ago, we made the decision to keep all the purchased artwork, which wasn't much, boxed up and eventually sold it. Instead, we opted to only hang up original artwork created by us on our walls. For me, that is mostly enlargements of my photography but for my wife, it is oil paintings that she has done. Although they hang throughout the house, our main entry hall has too large walls that we have used for smaller artwork and the best of the best done by our kids. We hung up a number of them earlier this spring during spring cleaning but there were three that couldn't be hung because they didn't have anything to hang them by. 

We had a framer here in town but it was always quite expensive to use them and they have retired anyway and the shop has since closed. There is a large box store hobby shop that supposedly does framing as well but I have never used them. Since these three really don't need to be professionally framed, as a medical diploma might need to be, I decided to just make my own frames. I bought a single piece of poplar and spend a morning cutting a simple beveled profile on it and cutting out the various pieces. Today I have glued them together and reinforced the corners with slices of much harder oak wood. Tomorrow I hope to cut those pieces flush, sand everything and paint the frame matt black to match all the other frames in the hallway. Hopefully sometime this weekend, we will have three more originals added to our collection. For reference, the smallest frame is about 10 inches wide by 12 inches tall.

Flash forward a week, and above you see the finished results ready for my wife to decide where they go so I can hang them. The ones one the left were done by my wife many many years ago and hung in the old farmhouse until recently. The one on the right was done by my youngest during spring break when her older sister was away on her trip.  The all add a nice splash of color to our house interior.