Even before the New England Patriots won the AFC championship, we had a feeling they’d have a very good year!  At the same time, we always wanted to have a framed jersey example in the shop, but full-sized jerseys are rather large and would take up too much of our limited display space.  We found this baby Tom Brady jersey and framed it up the same as we would a big one; even the moulding is left over from a jersey framing job!

Whoever your favorite team is, bring us your sports memorabilia!  We can transform it into a wonderful display piece for your home!

Just in time for Veterans Day, we present our most recent military memorabilia project.  The Brown Elementary School in Natick is named for Harold and Howard Brown, two brothers from West Natick who served in World War II and paid the ultimate price in the name of freedom.  The brothers’ medals and decorations were donated to the school, and Baldwin Hill Art & Framing was chosen to present them in a manner befitting their sacrifice.  We thought it would be fitting to include photographs of the brothers to give a human face to these badges of honor.  Each brother is depicted beneath his Purple Heart, and the other decorations are arranged around this in a tasteful black shadowbox.  The finished size is about 24″x18″.

You, too, can honor the military hero in your own life.  A display like this can be a wonderful gift or memorial to showcase a proud military career!

Today’s vocabulary word is “decagon”, which is a 10-sided regular polygon.

Our latest creation shows what we can do with multi-sided frames!  This year is the 10th anniversary of Natick Artists Open Studios.  We built a prototype 10-sided frame and showed it to a number of Open Studios artists; one of them (David Kahn) realized that this was the perfect showcase for his own 10-sided creation!

This piece is called “Ten Ten Ten”.  It consists of ten photographs, each of ten items, and each photo is repeated ten times spiraling in towards the center.  It will be on display at the Morse Institute Library in Natick through October.  This print will be available in a signed, limited edition for $300 unframed, $700 in a rectangular frame with a 10-sided mat opening, and $900 in the special 10-sided frame.

This antique parasol may have seen better days, but it has a lot of sentimental value for its owner.  At Baldwin Hill Art & Framing, we treasure your items as much as you do!

We set the parasol at a stylish angle in a black shadowbox, then capped it with a lovely silver floral-patterned moulding.  The backing is a Peterboro silkscreen patterned mat, which is repeated on the inner sides of the shadowbox.  The shaft is attached to the backer in two places with monofilament line, and the fabric is stitched down in a few strategic places as well.

Bring us your treasure and let us work our magic on it!

At Baldwin Hill Art & Framing, we’re not just a bunch of squares!  In fact, you might say that we have all of your angles covered.

I picked up this piece of fantasy art at a science fiction convention a few years ago.  It’s acrylic on canvas, painted gallery-wrap style on a traingular stretcher.  We built the frame out of some leftover floater moulding so as not to cover any of the edges.

To build this frame we had to miter the mouldings at a 60-degree angle, which most moulding saws or choppers are not capable of doing.  As you can see we pulled it off, but we’re not saying how…

We don’t just stop at three or four sides either.  We can make frames with three, four, five, or more sides to complement projects of any shape!

Business has been a bit slow lately.  While we much rather prefer to be busy, a slow period lets us catch up on those things we’d been meaning to get around to for some time.  This is an example.

A fellow framer emailed me a picture of this Saturday Evening Post cover, which I found quite amusing.  It doesn’t happen very often, but occasionally a customer comes in and by the time we’ve come up with just the right design it seems as though nearly every corner sample in the shop is strewn across the design counter.  This cover, by Stevan Dohanos, captures such a moment in a whimsical manner.

We located a copy of the actual magazine on eBay, and that is what we have framed here.  The whole magazine is set into a sink mat, and then the double mat is placed over that (Peterboro silkscreen top mat, Crescent gold bottom mat).  No adhesives at all touch the magazine, making this mounting 100% reversible.  This lovely design will be in our store window through the end of August, 2011.  Come on down and see for yourself!

We were playing around with mat designs and decided that this stepped-corner design had a nice Art Deco feel to it.  We paired it with this lovely print and frame.  The mat itself is a black-core white mat.  Black-core mats produce a black outline when cut on the bevel.  This produces a visual break between the mat and the image that is subtler than a double-mat design.

We love it when people bring us out-of-the-ordinary items to frame!  We’re always up for a challenge, and we can frame just about anything.

This customer brought us a jigsaw puzzle of a beautiful panorama of the Boston skyline.  The puzzle alone was over 38 inches long.  With mat borders the finished piece was a little over 44 inches long, making the piece officially “oversized”.  The customer wanted whitespace between the puzzle and the top mat, so we dry-mounted the puzzle to the backer board and put a spacer between the backer board and the top mat.

A word of caution to those bringing us jigsaw puzzles to be framed: be sure to secure the puzzle properly during transport.  You can either use a puzzle roll-up mat or sandwich the puzzle between two sheets of cardboard and tape them together.  The customers who brought this puzzle learned their lesson the hard way: they had simply placed it on a board in the back seat… and then they hit a pothole.  When they came into the shop they  had half a puzzle and a pile of pieces.  We set them in a corner where they could reassemble the puzzle while we tended to other customers.  Eventually all the pieces fell into place and the result is the beautiful framed project you see here!

Bring us your piece of whimsy and let us put it on your wall in style!

With Independence Day nearly upon us, we should take a moment to consider those who helped bring about our independence and keep us free over the years.  A wonderful way to honor military service  is to frame some memorabilia from that career.

A few months back, this customer brought us a medal and ribbon, along with the citation for the award and a photo of the medal being awarded.  Working with the customer, we designed this tasteful and elegant layout.   The top mat is neutral but slightly warm and textured, to complement the color of the ribbons.  The bottom mat complements the color of the unit insignia.  The frame once again complements the red ribbons, and the layout balances the proportions of all the elements.

There are endless possibilities for framing military memorabilia.  Bring us your medals, insignia, and certificates and let us design a display that will do them proud!