Cloth is the hardest thing we frame. Paper wants to lie flat; textiles want to hang, stretch, fold, and breathe, and their dyes are among the most light-sensitive materials in any collection. Framing them well is equal parts conservation, engineering, and dressmaking. Here is how it's done — and what to insist on for anything made of fiber.
The one rule: stitched, never glued
Every adhesive eventually fails, and on cloth it fails destructively — bleeding through weave, stiffening drape, staining permanently. Conservation textile mounting uses thread, not glue: the piece is stitched to a padded, fabric-wrapped archival support, through its own structure, with stitches that carry weight evenly and come out without a trace. A textile glued to a board has lost value the moment the glue touched it; a textile stitched to a mount can be released in ten minutes, unchanged.
Weight is the enemy
A hanging textile is a structure under load. Mount it wrong and gravity elongates it — visible as scalloped edges and drawn weave within a few years. So support is distributed: full-surface pressure mounting for delicate silks, stitched support lines along strong structural elements for jerseys and garments, and padded forms inside anything that should read dimensionally rather than flat.
Depth, air, and glass
Textiles are framed in shadowbox construction — the cloth held well off the glazing, with air around it. Contact with glazing risks condensation wicking and surface abrasion; depth also lets a garment read as a garment. Glazing is 99% UV-filtering, always: textile dyes fade faster than nearly any pigment on paper, and the damage is invisible until it's done. For heirloom silks — christening gowns, flags, an Hermès scarf — we specify anti-reflective museum glazing so the fibers stay readable behind the glass.
The pieces we see most
Jerseys and signed sports memorabilia: mounted on padded forms, folds arranged deliberately, signatures positioned and protected. Silk scarves: floated or pressure-mounted without adhesive; the drape and border designed like a composition, because it is one. Weavings, tapestries, and fiber art: often float-framed — the edges shown, the textile presented as the artwork it is, as with the tapestries in our textile gallery. Samplers, needlework, and quilts: stitched to mounts through their ground fabric, glazed against dust and handling. Heirloom garments and flags: padded, supported, and cased with enough depth to honor their dimensionality.
Objects follow the same logic
Everything above extends to three-dimensional objects: support without alteration, mounts that grip by geometry rather than adhesive, enclosures that keep dust and hands away. For medals, instruments, ceramics, and artifacts, that usually means a custom armature inside an acrylic case — museum mountmaking at domestic scale. See our display alternatives pages for that side of the studio.
If it's cloth — or it's dimensional, fragile, and loved — bring it in. The consultation costs nothing, and the difference between a stitched mount and a glued one is the difference between preserving an heirloom and laminating it.