Making some art frames for my buds

I’ve been getting into a woodworking sub-hobby lately: making frames for photos and art. I was able to score a second hand mat board cutter and am slowly building up my skills. Here’s my very first attempt, before I had access to a mat board cutter and it doesn’t have acrylic glazing (the glass that goes on top of the art) that all my later attempts do:

I took the learnings from this first attempt and decided I wanted to make 4 frames at once from a board of walnut I’ve had in my workshop for a year or so. But before I moved to this more medium scale production I wanted to try out making a more intricate mat board intensive design and apply the learnings from the last attempt, and this frame was the outcome:

I was so very happy with this result and got to try out things like splines for the miter joints, ordering and fitting the acrylic into the frame, trying out the mat board cutter and attaching hanging hardware to the back of the frame.

Okay so now I was ready to make a batch of frames! Between offering to make these frames and final delivery it took me about 2-3 months given that I only really make progress on the weekends between juggling my different hobbies. Here are the finished frames, I thought they turned out pretty nice!

Some process pictures:

My first step was getting the measurements for the art and mocking up some paper in the same measurements in order to confidently cut mat board. One of the art pieces will be float mounted on mat board which was an interesting twist and I was happy to learn that as well.

I also built this miter cutting jig along the way for the four frame pieces to connect correctly and as perfectly as possible, and I can vouch for how huge of a help it was to do so:

Here you can see the result of the first round of cutting and figment mock up, nearly perfect just some adjustments needed:

The key for me was to make sure that two joining pieces always use the opposite side of the same table saw blade - so opposite sides of the jig. A bit of a no brainer in hindsight probably.

So after final glue up I began the long arduous process of cleaning up and finishing the frames:

Finishing is such a long drawn out process and may actually have taken me longer than all the other steps combined.

I usually following something like this process for each piece:

• 60 grit
• 80 grit
• 120 grit
• Water pop
• Dry
• 180 grit
• 220 grit 
• Mineral spirits application
• Re-sand any imperfections highlighted by mineral spirits applications, reapply mineral spirits to clean this round up if so
• Boiled linseed oil application 1 
• Wait 24 to 48 hours
• 300 ish grit hand sand very lightly to knock down any dust nibs
• Tung oil application 2
• Wait 24 to 48 hours
• 300 grit light hand sand again
• Tung oil application 3
• For these frames I applied finishing wax with a buffing wheel, which is something I may not do again in the future - as I damaged a couple of the frames and had to re-sand and refinish the dents which was a nightmare.

And that’s kind of the high level view of the process, I left out a bunch of small details but at this point I attach the hardware for hanging to the frame, the hardware that holds all of the layers of the frame together, I install the glazing (acrylic), the mat board with the art attached, the backing board and then secure it with the hardware that holds it all together. With the float mounted frames I also added a spacer between the artwork/mat board and the acrylic to let it breathe and not collect moisture over time which can damage your prints.

This was a big huge large long process but the results were pretty satisfying! I do want to make more frames and I think I need to stream line my process a bit to let me prep a large amount of frame material and possibly even finish it prior to assembly as that would likely be fastest. I also want to try out some different types of wood!

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