Stem Cell Photo Presentation Frame

We've done a lot of framing for our clients at the University of Chicago Medical Center and, in this case, we got to create something pretty special for a very wealthy donor that they hoped would donate generously to their Stem Cell research program. Depicted above is a photo micrograph of a number of man-made stem cells that the department is working on. Knowing how important this work is and, by the very notion that these cells are worth more than gold, itself, we decided to use gold to showcase them.

The frame used is a Larson Musee collection frame, #L459630, about 1 1/2" wide, covered in 23 kt. watergilded leaf. The leaf is appplied over a black bole, or undercoating, and then lightly distressed to show the black through a little bit. 23 karat gold, when pounded very thin, is nearly translucent to begin with. You can acutally see where the sheets of gold leaf overlap each other as they are applied.

We used the matching 1/4" wide gold fillet, #L108630, to surround the photograph. Here is how the 5 3/16" matting layers up: The top 4" layer is a Crescent Moorman 67114 Carbon Black Suede with a black core (the beveled edge from the 7114 white-core Black linen would be too distracting), with the gold fillet fitted into the reverse bevel of that top mat layer. Below it, we have another layer of black-core black suede, showing 3/4", with a bottom layer of a violet Moorman 7567 Linen showing 3/16" surrounding the photograph. Matted size of the composition was 18 1/8 x 20.