How to Make a Shadow Box Frame

Video transcription

Hi I'm Robin with Images of Austin here in Austin, Texas. Visit us on the web at imagesofaustin.com. Hi today we're going to talk about shadowboxing a spoon that's a relic that you can also get yourself at the Capital Book Store here in Austin, Texas. But anyway first you have to attach this to its backing before you attach it to its backing you want to make sure your backing fits your frame like so, o'kay? I'm going to do that today with a hot glue gun. Now you take your hot glue gun. You add a little bit of glue to the back of the object that you're going to shadowbox and you just center it on to your backing. Now while that is setting up we need to cut a piece of glass to fit this frame. O'kay we've cut our piece of glass. Now we want to make sure that it fits the frame. Now I'm going to cut the shadowbox sides. In this case I'm going to use the same color for the sides as I am for the backing. You could do a contrasting color if you want but I'm going to use the same color. To do that you have to take your mat board, your backing and mount it to this foam board. To do that I like to use just some sort of liquid glue and a little roller and then I lay this down like so. Now you let that set up. Now we are going to figure out how deep we want to make our shadowbox. I would like to use a ruler that it cut off at the one inch mark and use it to measure from the glass to the back of this fame. In this case we have 3/8 of an inch. Now before you cut your sides you want to make sure that your object is going to clear that space so that it doesn't touch the glass. Now to cut our shadowbox size. Now first I want to get a nice straight edge to start off with. I am going to use this and that gives us a nice clean edge. Now remember we said we were going to make the sides of our shadowbox 3/8 of an inch. We need four sides because of course a frame has four sides most of the time. So here I go measuring and making a mark every 3/8 of an inch. Marks at the top and marks at the bottom. Now we have cut all four of our sides of our shadowbox. The next thing that we want to do is we are going to want to cut them to length for each side. What I like to do for the first two is line it up on top of the edge of this frame, just make a mark where each cut is going to be and I usually label which side is going where. This is going to be A, the same thing for each side afterwards. It's a good idea to go ahead and put in two sides first before you cut the remaining two sides because the remaining two sides have to go inside of the other two sides. O'kay now that our glass is clean I'm going to drop it back into the frame and I'm going to use a little double stick tape and I'm going to do side A first. We have completed our shadowbox sides. The glass is not coming out. Now the next thing we want to do is take what we're framing and lay it down on top. Alright now we want to gently put in a few clips and that is holding it in. Now we're going to finish up the back. Take our dust cover. It could be any kind of paper, stick it down to the back. Now we have finished the back of our picture with our dust cover. Now all we are lacking is the hanging device on the back. I'm going to use this large sawtooth and finish it off with some information about who did it, where it came from and that is our shadowbox spoon. That wraps up framing the spoon. Now remember if you can't come to me as your framer be sure and find a good one that you can communicate well with and be sure and hang the picture straight. Thank you and have a great day. Bye.