A Gilded Frame made with Pine.

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vintage frames
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A Gilded Frame made with Pine.

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IMG_3214.JPG

The shape of this profile is based on a Morland Frame. That is where you have a deep central hollow and surround it with a high burnished wall. This sort of frame looks especially good around 18th/19th cent. prints and paintings.

And this is how I made it.

The profile is cut from 1 and the half of one, R&H STR2 Pine stretcher. The inner section and hollow was scooped out from one stretcher and the high outer wall cut from the other. Both were then glued together to form the finished moulding.

This can then be called a Stacked moulding.

I used pine because it has a pleasing weight to it and adds some perceived value to the finished frame. You do have to watch it with pine though. It's important to raise up the grain first and then sand it smooth. Otherwise the long grain lines can print through even several layers of Gesso.

With that done the frame was spray Gessoed, sanded smooth and a small string of beading laid along the inner sight line. This all takes a bit of time. But then the customers who buy these frames are happy to pay hundreds of pounds for the time you take making them.

After a couple of thin coats of Bole, the frame is washed and polished and ready for gilding.
Gilding is by water-gilding and then after 24hr. the gilding is distressed and burnished to suit.

The frame is then treated with several coatings of a self-mixed Toning Glaze painted between some layers of glue size.

The last process is probably the most important and perhaps the most elusive. It's here that all the preceding work is judged. If the gilding looks right then the galleries will buy it. If it doesn't, then the work is no better than all the other competitors for the work.
The difference is quite difficult to describe but perhaps the best analogy is the comparison of a new pine board with the creamy brown solidity you see on well scrubbed antique pine furnishing.

And you can of course buy a trial sample of the Toning Glaze from my web-site!
Affordable Gilding Course for Professional Framers-https://www.dermotmcardle.co.uk/
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Orde02
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Re: A Gilded Frame made with Pine.

Post by Orde02 »

Looks fantastic Dermot! I need to buy some more of you glaze.

Matt
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Re: A Gilded Frame made with Pine.

Post by Not your average framer »

Looks great, Dermot. I imagine that there's quite a lot of time involved in making that, especially with machining and gluing together the pieces of pine. I try to only make limited modifications to existing bare wood mouldings and wherever possible I try to avoid any significant set up time with things like routers. I do alter mouldings quite often, but my favorite machines for doing most things are my band saw. bench top belt sander and more recently my surface planner. Any significant machning tend to make life difficult for me and there needs to a worthwhile reason for doing this. Much of what I offer to my customers is very different to what is normally available else where, but a lot of this did not come about by careful planning, but a lot of this happened the way it did because of circumstance and the need to work with whatever happened to be available from mostly old stock which was not normally salable. The surface planner does a great job, the finish produced with an electric planner is still a machined surface and I can still tell the different between that and a hand planed surface, so things almost a ways thing get a light sanding on the belt sander afterwards. Time is my biggest problem since my stroke, because I take so long to do things.

Using the surface planner tends to add more time to making things, but I find the plnner is very useful as it removes a accurately defined amount of wood in a very uniform manner and is very easly to keep profiles nice and square. Some of the older more traditional bare wood mouldings are often cheaper than equivalent more modern looking mouldings profiles, but sometimes just flattening off some of the raised curved features can give some of these cheaper mouldings a more up to date look, just turning small raised rounded feature in to a raised flat instead, slicing part of the raised feature off on the band saw. I don't do this always, but I am making some display chevrons for customers to see and I can slice up mouldings if a customer wants that moulding. There's a couple of cheap flat obeche mouldings which I buy to use for slicing up and making bits and pieces. I also turn certain small moulding in to slips, or liners. If the price is right, I like to add slips and liners to small, or medium sized frames to make them look bigger and this definitely makes them a lot easier to sell.

So much of what I do is largely driven by necessity, rather than by design, by then the need to make things look like they were always meant to be like and that has to come in to your thinking somewhere along the line. Originally much of making up different profiles was limited by stacking mouldings only. This did not change much until I started buying certain tools and machinery. I used to use lots of hand tools, before my stroke and then I was not able to do so this so much with hand tools after my stroke and I needed to use machine tools much more. The machine tool which really turned out to be a game changer for me was the band saw. I use it so much and as time goes on I keep finding more things which are just so easy to do with a band saw. For me, band saws are all about doing things accurate and with speed. A bench top band saw is limited in available power, so I mostly cut pine and obeche to maintain a high cutting speed. It will cut oak,but it's much slower to do so. These days it is much easier to use some of my dead stock for stacked moulding frames, because frames which would not previously fit together, get altered on the band saw so that they fit together perfectly.
Mark Lacey

“Life is short. Art long. Opportunity is fleeting. Experience treacherous. Judgement difficult.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer
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