The Framers Forum

Our town's local auctions has just gone bust. I had already suspected as much last week, but today I was told this by someone who I think has reason to know for sure.

It's a bit of a disappointment for me as I used to buy pictures framed in old swept frames and turn them into mirrors to sell at a profit, or anything else which could be bought for the right price and turned into something desireable with a good chance that I can sell it.

Some customers used to buy items from there and get me to reframe them. Auction days used to bring more people into the town. All gone now!

the Internet is taking over, but if it is any consolation, I have just sold a print to someone in Bovey Tracy and put a little note of recommendation for a very good framer in the same town, The Dartmoor gallary if I remember rightly, The customer is a Jane Falkner and the print is a Jill Ray, Walk on the beach summer, let me know if you get the job.

Sad news for you. Auction houses taught me that I had a product to buy and sell. In fact it was through this trade that I discovered the scale and depth of 3D framing.

Sadly, due to an untimely and tragic death, I lost a valuable friend in the auctioneering profession, who believed that 3D framing could greatly value add certain types of items that that re-occur in sale rooms and was keen to test some of the techniques we had developed.

The depth of this loss will be as much in interest value as in £SD terms.

Just as a side note, ifgl - that's a very decent thing of you to do, very decent indeed.

Thank you IFGL, that was very kind of you and I appreciate it very much.

I learnt the art of buying and selling around the auctions, charity shops, secondhand bookshops and jumble sales. In particularly I used to do very well from buying job lots of old magazines to take old adverts from, but too many people are doing it these days and you almost never find this sort of stuff anymore.

I also used to get a lot of work fixing frames, cutting mounts, reframing things, etc, for local antiques dealers, but there's a lot less work from the antiques trade as well. It's not just the antiques dealers that I miss, but the way that they would always let me know about anything that they had seen for sale that they thought would interest me.

An interesting apprenticeship, in some ways snap, the days before buyers premium, I think the margins for buying, improving or restoring and reselling was better. Household sales in the 60's and 70's saw more dilapidated quality, which could be restored and had good margins to be made. The learning curve of making re-saleable something from another era and getting them accepted into a higher quality auction was very rewarding.

It's very hard to find decent items to convert or restore with a view to reselling at all now. People find saleable items in their attic these days and wreck them with a bit of DIY preparation which destroys any collectable value and then sell them on eBay for peanuts.

It never ceases to amaze me what has been done to unreplaceable paper items which customers have bought on eBay and bring to me to be corrected before framing. One popular thing to do to some unreplaceable historic piece of paper is to glue it to something totally unsuitable with the aid of a tube of superglue.