A Slip Frame for Alabaster Pieces

We’ve got lots of techniques up our sleeve to solve a variety of custom picture framing “problems”. In this video, we show you a frame we made that allows a customer access to some some tiny antique alabaster pieces she picked up on a trip to Egypt. The technique is called a slip frame because it is constructed in a manner that allows the frame to “slip” off when the customer to wants to remove and handle the art or just reposition the pieces. We made shelves for the art in the house, complete with carved slots for the art to sit. Shelby is an accomplished artist and quite good with carving tools! The beautiful background color is a Durango suede fabric from Frank’s Fabrics and the frame is smoked timber from Larson Juhl’s Axel line. The inner frame is a simple brown stained Italian wood from International Moulding. And to top it all off, we used Tru-Vue’s optimum museum acrylic which is an awesome clear product yet virtually unbreakable.

Watch our Video and You’ll Learn:

• A slip frame is an excellent method to make a shadowbox accessible for occasionally handling objects. Other methods include acrylic box displays, including gravity groove, and hinged frames, turn-button frames and regular shadowboxes.
• We can frame just about any object you wish to display and preserve, from tiny Egyptian antiques to coins, buttons, pins, sports items and even more.
• We love to troubleshoot and come up with new and different display methods.

Here is the transcript of the Video:

Shelby: Hi, this is Shelby from over at Frame Minnesota here to show you a pretty cool project we’re working on today. This is a piece to hold a bunch of alabaster objects that a customer got while she was visiting Egypt. They’re in what is called a slipped frame. There’s some cool stuff on the back of the objects that she wanted to be able to see and we can’t use any glue or anything because they’re very, couple of hundred years old, and we wanted to preserve them.

This has these two little nails up at the top here that hold the frame into place. When we take those out, we can simply lift that frame out and place that one aside and then we can look at these really cool objects. They are … I have no idea what they mean, but I think they’re cool.

This also has a bunch of a hand wrapped fabric in it. This part, as well as these little shelves, were all made by gluing down that fabric and wrapping it by hand.

One last really cool feature of this project is we have our Optium Museum Acrylic in here, which is a plexiglass product that is crazy clear. It all turns out really nice together if I can get this nail back in. There we go. That is all that I have for you today. This was Frame Minnesota and thanks for watching.

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Links

• Frame Minnesota
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