A Helpful “Invention”

One of my three brothers is here, visiting from Australia. The rules for leaving the country mean that he has to stay away for three months. There are two good things about that rule; 1. We get to spend more time with him than his usual 4-5 week stay and 2. he likes to keep busy and have things to do.

Before he arrived, he asked us to make a list of things we needed help with around the house and any jobs he could do while he was here. One of the things on that list was to make some kind of stand to safely store the slate frames that have ongoing projects on them. Currently, I have 5 different projects ongoing and leaning them against the wall isn’t a great way to keep them safe.

Here’s a close up of how the stand works. The measurements are as follows: Start with 1 piece of pine that’s 36” x 7” x 1.5”. Cut grooves that are ⅝” wide x 1” deep and ½” apart (approximately). He had to use an empty slate frame to figure out the measurements for the frames I own so, if you want to replicate this, you will need to make sure the side bars fit into the grooves, but not tightly. There needs to be a bit of play in the space so the frames tilt back ever so slightly.

Here is the holder on top of one of my work tables. It will most likely be moved to the floor, but I have to find a corner where I know it will be out of the way of foot traffic.

You can see that I use various pieces of cloth (a beautiful old pillowcase, a piece of toweling) and tissue paper to cover my work. I find that thread clips (those colored ring like things at the top of the frames) work beautifully for keeping the fabric or tissue in place.

I hope this is useful to some of you and helps those of you who have more than a few UFO’s on slate frames!