Framing embroidery

[less]

Hi,

A lady brought in two pieces of chinese embroidery for possible framing (she has taken them away again to iron out the creases!).

The pieces have no empty borders but are hemmed onto a backing material. Is it acceptable to stich through this backing material onto foamboard or mountboard?

The customer does not want a window mount so I thought that what amounts to a float mount would be ok. Any other ideas? The pieces are not too big, about 10inches by 5ins. and are very finely sown so may have or acquire commercial value.

Les Sutherland aka less

[John]

I'm not sure that I'm the one to help you on this Les, but just to clarify: when you say float do you mean that when framed the edges of the piece will be visible and not covered by the frame rebate?

[mick11]

Hi Les,
A couple of ways come to mind.
Cut the center out of a piece of foamcore the size of the finished work, then lay the work on the cutout and press it back in the hole.
Another method I use is shown on my website.
I can see no reason you cannot do it the way you describe if you want to.
If you are glazing, space the work away from the rebate so it does not touch the glazing.

[markw]

A lot of chinese textiles have a patterned border and many customers see this as a natural border to the image within - so dont want the piece to sit in a mount. The fact that you often have a number of pieces of fabric used to make the finished textile - all at different tensions - gives the framer a slight problem with stretching - you basically have to work around any unevenly tensioned parts of the textile. The answer is to cut a board same size as textile - carefully stitch outer edge to board - make sure stitches are hidden under rebate - use same colour as bg - frame using a spacer to allow slight gap between glass and textile. Low iron reflection control glass can work well with this sort of job as the colours are often very vibrant - the waterwight type glass maintains good clarity - customers are always impressed.

A few good articles in picture framing magazine recently about chinese art.

[less]

Hi,

thanks for the replies and helpful advice. I'd better get to it!

Les