02 Feb Custom Framing Letters: A Personal Piece of Art
Personal handwritten letters will never go out of style.
It’s true that there are more efficient ways to communicate with your loved ones, but emails and text messages do not have the staying power of handwritten letters. Most of the people we know can easily reach for a box or file full of cards, letters, and notes that mean something to them, but they tend to forget about a personal email that is a line item between a promotional ad and payment reminder.
We’re not here to tell you how to communicate, but we custom frame more letters than we do emails — think about that.
One of our clients decided to custom frame a letter written by a loved one with their fishing license. This person loved to fish and wrote about it in their letter. Combining both pieces into a single frame was a beautiful way to honor his memory.
We wanted to make this a unique piece. Our client wanted to keep the frame small and tighten up the relationship between the letter and the license. We decided to mat the letter and the license folder and float them on top of mat with the fishing license to create dimension.
Matting and floating certain pieces allowed us to create depth and creatively display the letter and license without sacrificing space. Angling the letter and layering it between the license documents adds intrigue and gave us the ability to include everything. A standard framing job would have been much larger because each piece in the frame would require a certain amount of matting between each document to give the overall frame breathing room.
Our client wanted a modern custom framing job that could work in any space. We chose a navy blue linen mat to add texture and allude to the sea. The raw wood frame complemented the art and gave the piece an overall modern and rustic feel (not an easy balance to strike). The overall effect is simple, but it has a tremendous amount of meaning in every aspect.
Letters from loved ones are a special type of art, especially if they are handwritten. We love how thoughtful this piece is. Everything from the frame to the matting to the letter was chosen with intention. Yes, there are more ways to connect with people than ever before, but we’ll never get over a good handwritten letter.
For more custom framing letter inspiration, check out Advice from President George H. W. Bush: Listen to Mom.