This past year at Frame of Mind we have had a lot of exciting and unusual projects come through our doors.

This has given us many opportunities to design projects together with multiple designers.

When we get multiple designers together, mix our design strengths we can come up with some amazing designs for our customers.

This month we bring you another one of our fun collaboration designs by owner Amy Doty, Gallery Manager & Designer Heather Taylor and Designer Heather Cox.

A while back a client brought us a special antique flag of the United States, she was looking to frame it, preserve it and wanted to present to her father as a gift.

This particular flag had been well used during its prime and it was not in perfect condition. It was faded and the material was very thin, it had been stretched from its original rectangular shape to more of an irregular parallelogram.

The shape of the flag really gave us the opportunity to think outside the box as to how to mount this flag in a frame in the most presentable way.

Amy came up with the idea of sewing the flag down in a way that would make it appear as if it was waving in the wind.

This took awhile and was fun to do. We used a small amount of batting to puff up the flag in specific places to help give it the feel of movement.

We started at the top left corner where the flag had originally hung from the pole as this is where its now natural shape started. We laid it out over and over to get the perfect amount of folds, batting and stitching so that this flag looked as if it was blowing in the wind.

When we start designing a piece to be framed alot of things come into play when deciding what materials will be best for that specific design.

In the case of this flag, we did not want to add too many colors or distractions with the design. The flag is also a larger size and that means that our materials need to match up to that larger size. The matting material needed to come in what we call "oversize" (they are not all available in oversize) and the frame needed to be sturdy enough to hold up the weight of the art, matting and glass. With all these things in mind we also need to make sure that the size of the moulding we chose is large enough not only for stability but also for aesthetics. We want it to be a significant size so that it does not disappear in this large piece.

For the flag we chose to sew it down to a cream colored matting material. It took a few days to sew down the entire flag in the shape that we wanted. By adding the batting material so that it would appear to be waving in the wind as well as be shaped into a rectangle.

We chose blue matting called "Jewel Blue" from our supplier Crescent. This matting material is a specialty fabric mat and has a lot of texture, it was a great compliment to the flag, as they were both fabric material and the color was a perfect compliment to this design.

When we started to put all the pieces together we chose to do a mat build up. This means that we added strips of foamcore under the mat, these pieces of foamcore were hiding as to not see them from the front and created some depth as well as a place for the flag to be where it would not be touching the glass.

Once the flag was mounted, and matted it was time to add the frame.

We chose a white frame with a slightly rough finish and a traditional shape that matched the overall feeling of the flag. The materials used in the design for this flag really made a big difference.

The flag that was faded and well used found a new home by using materials that compliment it and make it stand out!

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