Beaded Antique Purse Shadowbox

Our client travels a great deal and, when she brought in this collection of antique beaded purses, we figured she had picked these up during her travels. As it turns out, these were part of an extensive collection that belonged to her mother, and that she has a number of purse displays in her home.

When our shop manager, Dana, took these purses in to be framed, she designed a shadowbox that used a Bainbridge Fabric mat, #4097 Camel. In addition to creating a deep shadowbox mount out of the mat board, she had our Wizard 8500e computerized mat cutter do some art nouveau embossed designs into the mat surface as a backdrop for the purses. You may be able to make out some of the subtle embossing from the photos below.The shadowbox is, by the way, made from a single piece of mat board with fold-up sides . It is a really neat technique we figured our how to do on our mat cutter. We change the depth setting to have the cutter only cut half way through the mat board on the opening of the mat on the bottom layer of what it thinks is a double mat. That provides the scored fold line in the mat board.

The frame is 25 x 22 in size and is a Universal Framing Products gold leaf #4237. Glass is Tru-Vue AR anti-reflective glass to give maximum clarity. All the purses have been sewn down to anchor them in the shadowbox.

Frame job designed and executed by Dana L. Fisher, CPF

Images by kind permission of our client, Judith Thomas.