Framed Cigarette Cards from Frame Minnesota

Watch our Video and You’ll Learn: 

• We can design a beautiful custom frame for your collectibles
• We can tailor the project just exactly right so that it will look awesome in your home or office. 
• We can make many types of double-sided frames. This is just one example.

Here is the transcript of the Video: 

Shelby:  Hello, this is Shelby from Frame Minnesota here to tell you about our latest custom picture framing project.
This is a series of 24 cigarette cards from London, published in 1925. Cigarette cards are something that was sold with the pack of cigarettes as sort of a trading card collectible kind of thing and this particular series is a series of 24 orchids. So these cards are about one inch by two and a half inches, very small, so all those little windows are very painstaking to measure.
We have a single mat in this frame as well as the museum glass that is anti-reflective as well as UV filtering and we chose a mahogany veneer, nice dark rich color to go with the botanical theme of the piece.

The really cool part about this piece is it is double-sided. So when I flip this over, you can read all about each orchid on the back and I cut each of those windows a little bit differently. On that top row, the customer wanted to see the brand of the cigarettes as well as the logo on the bottom. So I cut them a little bit differently so we could see all of those but I still had a way to use some acid-free tape to melt the cards.

You can see on the back here, I’ve got two hooks rather than putting a wire right across the piece. This is some acrylic that is going to be a little bit safer than glass on the back and it’s assembled. I first painted the back of the raw woods, so it’s nice and black, a little more subtle. Then I have these four strips of pine wood that are measured to exactly the size of that frame. I painted everything first of all then I sandwiched the artwork between two mats, a piece of museum glass and a piece of that plexiglass and then I put it into the frame and nailed these strips right into the frame on top of it. So this is what’s holding everything together and it allows you to see both sides of those 24 cards.

That is our project for today. Thanks for coming. This is Shelby at Frame Minnesota over in Eagan, a local custom picture framing store.

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