Ever had an odd sized work of art that you wanted framed only to experience some rather severe sticker shock when you went to a custom framing store and priced having it done? I have quite a few paintings of odd size hanging unframed on my walls for that very reason. ((ok so the word plethora comes to mind LOL) I am somewhat abashed to say mostly with thumb tacks.) Usually standard frame sizes have not been foremost on my mind when beginning a painting

Over the past year several things have happened to motivate me to learn how to make my own custom frames. As part of my art business startup plan, I decided to ask local businesses if they would display some of my work. the hitch to this was that I did not have any frames to display them in publicly. So I bought some face paint and worked at the local farmers market to earn enough cash to hopefully at least get one frame. although I did earn enough to pay for the face paint and business cards I had printed up, it was sadly not enough to also pay for a custom made frame.

As a den leader for webelos scouts, one of the assignments was to have the boys make a picture frame. I had another leader, with more woodworking experience than me, help the boys make some rudimentary frames. I really wanted something a little more professional than what the boys came up with, and I had done some searching on line finding some interesting articles on building frames. Although it did not look terribly difficult to do, My budget and framing needs required that I do things a little differently. One article that was mentioned by the artist magazine’s blog had some really good instructions, but I needed to do things a bit differently because Watercolors must be framed behind glass or acrylic. There was another article that required having several routing bits to contour the frame. A router is definitely out of my budget range at the moment, although it did make some really nice frames. Then I found one by Bob Villa. Yes,THAT Bob Villa. His technique required fewer tools than the others. So I decided to give it a try ( after all he IS Bob Villa) and write an article on how it went. I am now done building the frame itself, and will be writing about it in stages as I bring my project to completion.

part 2 of this article…

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