Idea 1-Historic Baseball Jersey

Our client had the good fortune to be the grandson of a Major League Baseball Hall of Fame Team Manager, and inherited a trove of baseball memorabilia. One item,in particular, was tons of fun to frame. This was the Manager's Jersey for the 1928 St. Louis Cardinals. It was the jersey he wore while managing them to a World Series Championship that year.

Also included in the shadowbox frame were some sub-frames. That is, small, framed items with True-Vue Museum Glass on them were attached to bent, acrylic stalks that allowed them to hover out over the sewn-down uniform. These had to be fabricated from acrylic rod and sheet, bent with a heat gun and attached to both the fabric coverd matboard upon which the jersey was sewn as well as to the small sub-frame. The sub-frames contained an autographed picture of Bill McKechnie, the stadium the Cardinals played in, and a team photo. Other elements included a brass plate surface mounted at the bottom of the package as well as a debossed, fabric covered Cardinals logo in the lower left corner below the Jersey. It was cut out using the Wizard mat cutter's Pathtrace program, which involved tracing the whole logo and allowing the cutter to cut out the logo in the mat, then fabric cover it all and push the fabric down into the opening, or debossing it.

The frame actually is deep enough that two frames had to be joined together on edge to create the final depth and shape needed. This was accomplished by means of a table saw and some tradtional joinery techniques. Development and execution time for this project was about 4 to 5 months, as we had to use a lot of tools and techniques we had never before attempted. The whole frame job was designed and built by our frame shop manager, Dana Fisher.  A great learning experience and a a great looking shadowbox!

Images by kind permission of Mr. James McKechnie.