The Framers Forum

Hia all,

After some tips on this little project. I am happy doing most things, football shirts medals etc but I have never framed an Army beret. Any hints or tips on how best to do it please feel free to share! Thanks.

Rick K

(Being ex-forces) If the beret has been worn it will have already found the shape of the person's napper!! I personally think that if it has, then tag it flat the way that it wants to lay naturally with a deep mount.

It has now given me the idea to dig out my old Navy one and have a go.

Show us a pick when you're done.

Andy

Maybe, as it's normally viewed from the front; not from above, an acrylic box might be good?

I had thought about that, the ones designed for footballs come to mind. The customer did ask for it wall mounted which makes it a bit more tricky. It's getting the shape right to show off the cap badge. Will have an attempt later today!

That looks ok. Try it flat with the beret badge at the far left hand side and it flopping over. The beret is worn with the badge sitting over the left eye so it finds a natural "Flop" if you like with the badge at the left when it is folded and put in your trouser belt.

Hope this is helping and not hindering!

A military beret is not worn in the way shown in your photo. As previously mentioned the badge sits above the left eye. Like this:

It was an initial try and I have since adjusted it to have the badge over the left eye. Works quite well, I wish magic stitches came in red!

My approach would be to make a partial head form, I did quite a lot uniform displays and good tailoring is easy to create a shape for, but getting the the right conformation for something like a beret would take a lot of playing around with. A head shape is an oval with flattened sides, I would pin the rim to a shaped piece of 1/4in mdf with a hole cut in the middle, then pack it with sheets of tissue paper,you need enough room to get tissue into the right places and then you need to be able to beat it with a thin stick to spread the packing. I remember doing some military displays that were shipped over to Norway, but that must be nearly 20 yrs ago. These were done in an 8-10in. deep box display enough, room for a full crown of the head form. To get a side of the head shape, a right angle profile, would need to form the back of the form.
To reduce the depth of the display material would need to be lost,possibly by pushing it back into the head form on the blind side.

To do this work needs quite aggressive handling, fortunately I had plenty of uniforms to work on, I wish you luck and hope you manage a good display.

To do it flat, there is the possibility of fashioning an epaulette in an appropriate coloured material, shoulder patch and button would be handy for this line of thinking.

I suspect this is too late too influence your course of action but it has taken some time to create the model to get the images from. I post them as a course of experiment for someone who may follow up on this line of presentation. My advice would be to work with a beret that has little value as it took quite a bit of shaping the various profiles before a good shape was had.

I believe that my best results on military uniforms were 20 yrs ago and I had access to such materials as flock and tow to pack out the shapes. In later years I did jockey silks and helmet covers and these worked well with tissue paper.

Not tried this but you could cut a up-side down smile in the mount and have the back part of the beret going through the cut out so the excess is behind the mount

Here are three I googled. They might offer some inspiration.

http://www.inspirationsframing.co.uk/framed-beret.html

http://www.russellfineartservices.co.uk ... mples.html

http://www.normanclarkphotography.org/p ... 26042.html

the last one we did was stuffed with the kind of thing that goes inside quilts we incorporated some other bits and pieces including a rather pointy thin dagger., was for the local barracks, we do quite alot of stuff for them, the last item was a Zulu spear for the officers mess. I must start to take pictures.

I love seeing all the creative ideas here. I’ve worked with a few berets myself, and getting the shape right so it still feels natural is definitely the tricky part. The acrylic box idea sounds great for showing it from the front without it flattening out too much.