framing saturday shopping

I can't say that today was all that exciting and kind of short, however it was productive, if only because I did something I've been meaning to do for a good long while... well, five somethings actually.

It all started out with the usual routine... housework, shopping, unpacking...

And even though I ended up consuming four Strongbows last night, I didn't feel any the worse for wear, which is slightly surprising given my general low tolerance for booze and the fact that they equate out to 5.6 standard drinks.

Anyway, there wasn't much of interest to report on the supermarket/shopping front... blah blah, Girl Guide cookies, blah blah, toddler in a knitted panda hat, blah blah, old ethnic men who regularly amuse us more than they really should.

Our only real errand for the day was to head to the framing store to get Ma's birthday cross-stitch and the Rebecca Murphy print framed.

But since we were doing that I decided to take a bunch of prints and photos and things that I had sitting around unframed along and get it all sorted out in one fell swoop.

We stopped off at Freedom on the way, since a couple of the pieces I had should have been standard frame sizes, so I figured I'd look for a couple of cheaper options than professional framing... but alas, Freedom clearly wasn't the place to look for that. And there wasn't anywhere between there and the framing store that may have had something.

Now that I'm thinking about it, it may have been an idea to head down to Arndale first and then off to the framing place, but it actually kinda turned out pretty good at the end.

Well, after we went left instead of right after we left Freedom and then ended up going up and down the road three times before we finally found the framing store... we might have found it earlier if I hadn't been distracted when we went past the first time.

And of course the woman in the store mentioned that it'd been dead for most of the morning, but as soon as we got there and I had a bunch of stuff to work through, two different groups of people came in while we were there (although fortunately not at the same time). It wasn't even like it was one person... first it was a group of five adults, then it was a family of four... and the shop isn't that big to begin with.

So after Ma had been through her framing choices I let the woman serve the group of five adults just to get them out of the store. That turned out to be a good plan, because while she was doing that we had a look through the premade frames they had in the store and found two that fit the pieces that I had that were a standard size.

Then it took me a while to go through all the choices... you'd think it would be simple... I mean how many variations on a flat matt black frame are there really....

Although, now that I think about it, I think there's actually only one that's totally flat matt black.

The one that took me the longest amount of time to do was the Aquabumps photo I bought on our 2011 trip. In the end I checked out the Aquabumps website on my phone while the woman served the family and worked out that they recommend both skinny white and "raw" shadow box frames... so I went completely the opposite way from where I'd kind of been heading and went with that.

Fortunately I got a discount because I was getting more than one piece framed (a good tip to remember next time), and because they didn't have a sample of the shadow box frame on the wall the woman actually worked out the price using one of the other frame samples I'd picked out, which was cheaper (according to her anyway).

And, of course, after I made all my decisions and she'd written it all up and I'd paid for it, I started looking at the Cameron Brideoake print from the Organic teeshirt show and realised that it was missing a little something... so I pulled out a bunch of red matts and tried them out until I found one that matched... fortunately there was enough space to add a matt without increasing the size of the frame, so it wasn't that much more expensive to add a matt.

It did cost a bunch, but to be honest it came out to about as much as I'd expect to pay for one artwork of a decent size, and that was for five pieces (they're going to mount the two pieces that I bought the premade frames for as well, which saves me having to worry about it).

So now all of my unframed prints are about to be framed. Woohoo.

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