Framers Confessions: Things that went horribly wrong (but were salvaged)

Post examples...
Of framing styles or techniques that rocked your boat, and also of those that didn't
Post Reply
Evarcha
Posts: 8
Joined: Sat 14 Dec, 2019 3:23 pm
Location: Carnforth
Organisation: Ashworth Art
Interests: I am an artist and picture framer.

Framers Confessions: Things that went horribly wrong (but were salvaged)

Post by Evarcha »

I have really been enjoying going through this forum today, seeing some fantastic jobs and reading how people have come up with fantastic solutions to framing problems and it got me thinking: have you ever had a framing nightmare that very nearly gave you a breakdown?
I will confess to an incident a good many years ago, in my early days at the art gallery where I used to work.

My boss had taken in a re-glazing job, typically only £20 tops and so I was (quite rightly) expected to complete the task as quick as possible, in this cae I had one hour.
On this occasion I went to collect the rush job from the gallery to be greeted with a VERY badly framed collection of butterflies.
It was in a plastic frame with a piece of glass with a split down the middle. There was no backing to speak of, it was a kind of foamboard box that had been gaffa-taped into the rebate with a piece of string stapled to the frame for crude hanging. It was lined with a velvet-like material and pinned to this material were approximately 25 butterflies.
I spent a good ten minutes figuring out how I was going to get inside the job without destroying the already delicate materials and butterflies. The customer hadn't paid for any other kind of work to be done on this job so after chatting with my boss I was told to simply re-glaze and get it taped up/fixed in the best I could as the materials simply wouldn't take any pins/brackets/staples.
I managed to slice around the tape keeping the foamboard box in place, there were no other fittings securing this box in place...and so, very carefully I prepared to lift the foamboard box out of the frame. It was then that it all went wrong. As I lifted the box out of the box I didn't factor in the draft of air that was currently rushing into the frame and tearing off every single wing off every single butterfly.
Suddenly there were wings everywhere. I stood there in shock. I was holding this foamboard box with a bunch of worms in it whilst looking at a table full of various wings. I looked at the clock: I had 40 minutes left. What followed was a frantic sort of jigsaw-puzzling type of activity...matching up sets of wings...figuring out which wings suited which body. I glued the wings in place, to be fair, they were more sturdy for it and I cut the glass and assembled at break-neck speed. I finished sealing it all up (hot glue and heavy tapes) and took it into the shop. The customer was there and was over the moon with the job. I went back into the workshop and made myself the BEST cup of tea I have ever made, albeit with shaky hands.

There. I feel better for getting that off my chest. :)
User avatar
Rainbow
Posts: 891
Joined: Tue 23 Jun, 2015 8:51 am
Location: See my name, I'm somewhere over it
Organisation: Picture sales and framing
Interests: varied

Re: Framers Confessions: Things that went horribly wrong (but were salvaged)

Post by Rainbow »

OMG Evarcha I felt your pain! I guess I've had my fair share of minor scares, but they pale into insignificance compared with blowing the wings off 25 butterflies! Oh go on then, I'll tell you one of mine :D

I'd bought a small watercolour off an artist, with a view to framing and selling it. It was in shades of black/grey. I'd got the hinging tape in my fingers ready to attach, when it suddenly dropped on to the painting. When I lifted it off, it lifted some of the paint with it :o Thankfully I was able to mix some watercolour paint to the same colour and touch it in. I guess I wouldn't have done that if it had been a customer's painting, I suppose I'd have had to 'fess up and ask the artist to retouch it. I That was about 5 years ago when I first started commercial framing, and I learnt my lesson - ever since then I've been very careful not to transfer anything in my hand over the top of the picture!

See, I told you it was pretty boring compared with your story :D
User avatar
Rainbow
Posts: 891
Joined: Tue 23 Jun, 2015 8:51 am
Location: See my name, I'm somewhere over it
Organisation: Picture sales and framing
Interests: varied

Re: Framers Confessions: Things that went horribly wrong (but were salvaged)

Post by Rainbow »

I confess to doing another “touching up” job to a painting, although this time it was deliberate. The customer wanted to buy a pastel that I’d bought from an artist and framed for sale, but the customer wanted to change the frame. When I took it apart, they realised that I’d made the picture smaller in order to cover up a very prominent signature by the artist. The picture was very moody - a midnight lake, with the moon reflected in the water - very dark blues and blacks, very atmospheric, except that the artist had signed it in large WHITE paint, completely destroying the mood :( : The customer asked if I could mask the signature so that the picture could be made larger without the signature spoiling it. By the time I’d finished, you couldn’t see the signature at all - I’d used a combination of pastel colours to blend it in with the rocks on the beach. I don’t suppose the artist would have been very pleased, but the customer was thrilled and I confess I was pretty pleased with it myself :D
User avatar
prospero
Posts: 11492
Joined: Tue 05 Jun, 2007 4:16 pm
Location: Lincolnshire

Re: Framers Confessions: Things that went horribly wrong (but were salvaged)

Post by prospero »

I have had many outwardly simple jobs that turned out anything but. (As many others will have). That's why I
like to make things easily reversible. Only last week I needed to remount a print, only to find it had been very
firmly glued to the existing mount and undermount. I removed it, but not without damage to the margin.
Artists who do their own mounting are particularly guilty of this.
"Why would anyone want to take it out the mount?" is their ethos. :lol:

By far the most nightmarish job was a 6'x4' frame for an oil painting. The frame was BIG, but not complicated
on the face of it. The major snag was the artist was in contact with the customer for the painting and relayed
what she wanted to me and I had to interpret her desires second-hand. I had actually done a similar frame for
the same lady several years ago, so I suggested a frame in the same style. I still had the sample chevron.
Oh no I needed to be a more mellow tone and the frame needed to be thinner. No prob. Did it.
Quite a bit of work. The hard part was getting an even dragged woodgrain effect on a 24ft run of moulding
that was 5" wide. In the end it went on fine. A nice mellow oak colour. Waxed it all and it looked brill.

I wanted at this stage to use a cleat system for hanging. The artist insisted on cord (or wire) because he wanted
it to tilt forward. I could not convince him otherwise, but no way would it hang safely from a conventional wire.
I compromised by using the Japanese 'Museum' hangers sold by Lion. Superb quality and plenty of screw points.
Cost about £150. :roll:

The plot thickens.....

The artist was going to deliver the painting. The customer lived in Cornwall. About a 600 mile round trip.
So we spend about 3hrs on a wet and windy night trying to shoe-horn the painting into a mini-bus. Off he goes...... :clap:

The next day he is back - with the frame. (He left the painting).
Can I make it thicker and darker? (Which I wanted to do in the first place). So I set too and spent a few days scraping and
sanding off my meticulously created mellow oak finish. Then put an extra piece of timber around the edge. (Wickes skirting board. :lol:)
Finally got it done and away he went again. The whole episode reached such a pitch of absurdity that it really was difficult
to be annoyed about it. :P

Thank You for reading. :ninja:
Watch Out. There's A Humphrey About
Not your average framer
Posts: 11013
Joined: Sat 25 Mar, 2006 8:40 pm
Location: Devon, U.K.
Organisation: The Dartmoor Gallery
Interests: Lost causes, saving and restoring old things, learning something every day
Location: Glorious Devon

Re: Framers Confessions: Things that went horribly wrong (but were salvaged)

Post by Not your average framer »

I do a certain amount of sorting out and restoring old pictures and frames. It is very hard to work out in advance all of the things that are likely to go wrong when you are about to start working on one of these, but I has to be flawless when it is ready to go be to the customer. Many old frames are joined at the corners with very rusty old fashioned nails and often the old screw eyes for hanging are rusted inside the frame and ready to break off inside the frame. Customers have really high expectation of how wonderful these manky old frames are going to look when the are ready to collect and you have to be well able to met their expectations, regardless of how appalling such things are. Really bad corners have to be trimmed a little to make things fit nicely and that means removing the old nails in the corner joints.

Quite often these nails break of in the wood and it is necessary to remove the broken bits of the nail buried inside the wood and make a completely hidden repair, while unwarping warped frames, recreating broken of missing pieces and giving the perfect impression of an original frame of that period which has no detectable signs of having been repaired. Then there are screw eyes that break off inside the frame, when you try to unscrew them. Unfortunately the owners expect to rehange their pictures on the original wall hocks and everything to be at the same height alignment as before, which I might add is something that rarely happens. Unfortunately owners start to look more closely at the back of the frame and take great exception to the fact that the replacement screw wyes are not in the same hole as where the original screw eye once was.

Removing bits of old broken screws and nails can be a real big thing. So much so, that solve such issues as a matter of course to keep everyone happy. I'm not joking about this, it's a serious PiTA. Filling old holes and sanding the surface smooth, does not work! It stands out like a sore thumb, you can all too easily see where an old piece of wood has been filled and then sanded down no matter how you do it, it will look like a bodge. With the best will in the world removing the remains of broken off screws involves a bit of digging around and things need fixing really neatly and without resorting to modern fillers. Most people have very little idea of how the craftsmen of bygone years, solved such problems, but they made a proper repair with real wood and it would be very hard to see, also I would be as strong as the original wood.

Making it look perfect, can lead to very nearly tearing your hair out and then customers can't understand why restoration is not cheap and takes time to get it looking how they always expected it too. Yes, most of us are real artists at what we do, but we rarely get much credit for how good we really are at getting things right in often very unpromising situations.
Mark Lacey

“Life is short. Art long. Opportunity is fleeting. Experience treacherous. Judgement difficult.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer
User avatar
prospero
Posts: 11492
Joined: Tue 05 Jun, 2007 4:16 pm
Location: Lincolnshire

Re: Framers Confessions: Things that went horribly wrong (but were salvaged)

Post by prospero »

Occasionally you can be the pigeon rather than the statue... :D

A lady once brought in a framed picture and asked if I could touch up the frame. It was the good old wrapped
aluminium, which only takes a cross look to look tatty. This was very tatty. I was about to give here the spiel on
how it was nearly impossible to restore when it dawned on me that the original framer apparently hadn't realised it
had protective plastic film on that you were supposed to remove. So I asked the lady to wait a few minutes and took the
picture into the workshop and peeled off the film. It was immaculate underneath.

She was very pleased if not to say gobsmacked. :shock: I didn't charge her either. :clap:
Watch Out. There's A Humphrey About
Post Reply