Help Our Shop: Now With Potato Salad!
Donation protected
Update: In our ongoing effort to have both excitement and tastiness in our fundraising efforts, we have added Potato Salad! If this guy can raise five figures just for THINKING of making potato salad, imagine what we can do! I like to consider myself a pretty good cook among other things. If we meet our fundraising goal by the time of Natick Artists Open Studios this fall, I will make and serve as many varieties of potato salad as I can come up with during the event! Red skin potato salad with garlic aioli! Yukon Gold potato salad with sauteed shallots and a touch of dijon mustard! Baby heirloom potato salad with Hungarian paprika! Just imagine the possibilities! Support us at the Platinum level with a gift of $500 or more and you can join us for a special VIP potato-salad tasting reception on Friday, October 17!
Update: New rewards have been added for our generous contributors; see below!
Baldwin Hill Art & Framing is an independent custom picture framing shop located in downtown Natick, MA, about 15 miles west of Boston. We have been delighting customers with creative frame designs since 2006. We also offer digital imaging services, giclee printing, photo restoration, original artwork, jewelry, and prints.
Recently, we moved to a beautiful new location. Our old shop was down in a basement with limited visibility, while the new place is right at street level with huge windows and lots of foot traffic. It's wonderful, but the increased business is testing the limits of our equipment. Much of our equipment is suitable for a small studio that does only a few frames per week -- which is what we were when we first started out! Now that we need to produce serious volume, we need some upgrades:
Board & Glass Cutter: $2000. ACHIEVED! THANK YOU! Also known as a "wall cutter", this tool sits on a wall and is used to cut large square stock such as matboards, foamcore, and glass. Keeping the cuts absolutely square and straight is crucial, and the one we have does not do a very good job of this. It has a number of design flaws and it easily falls out of adjustment (not surprisingly, it's not being made any more). We need to get the model we *should* have gotten from the outset.
Miter Saw: $4000: This is the heart of the business. This is the tool that we use to cut picture frame moulding to perfect 45 degree angles so they join up to form a nice, tight 90-degree corner with no gaps or tears. Our current set-up consists of a miter saw (the kind you get at Home Depot) with an 11-foot measuring scale bed. This has seen better days and has been through several shop moves. It's been banged around and is no longer giving us the accuracy we need, so we spend extra time touching up imperfect corners when instead we could be building more frames. We would like to replace this with a miter saw specifically made for the picture framing industry, designed from the outset for accurate miter cuts.
Digital Imaging Workstation: $2000: In addition to custom framing we also do digital imaging. We do photo printing, digital photo restoration, and reproductions of artwork for artists ("giclee prints"). We have a reputation for producing prints with incredible color accuracy such that it's often nearly impossible to tell the original from the print. Unfortunately, the monitor on our digital imaging workstation is not professional-grade; some colors it reproduces better than others. The end result is that it can take multiple proofing passes to achieve color accuracy to our standards. A proper professional-grade monitor is over $1000. The remainder of this will be used to perform some much-deferred maintenance on our main printer.
Improved lighting for showroom and workroom: $1500. The current store has 100% track lighting. This is great for shining spotlights on artwork, but not so good for places like the design counter and workroom, where bright, diffuse light that fills the room is more desirable. We need to bring in an electrician to wire in suitable fixtures for our needs
Miscellaneous small tools and other items: $500
With these improvements we should be able to greatly increase our throughput, delivering more jobs at better quality with shorter turnaround times.
To thank our contributors for their generosity, anyone who contributes $50 or more will receive an equivalent gift card to our store, good for any framing or digital imaging service. Give $50, get a $50 gift card. Give $100 and get a $100 gift card! You can use your gift card yourself, or you can give it as a holiday gift!
In addition, donors who contribute $75 will receive a print of our very own wealth mascot "Money Luck" by Natick artist Tamu. "Money Luck" depicts a stylized arowana fish. The Chinese consider the arowana a sign of prosperity as their round gold scales resemble gold coins.
Donors who contribute $100 or more will receive a print of the painting "Bower" by Tamu. This lovely painting depicts two stylized creatures nestled in their dwelling place, suffused with a beautiful golden light:
Donors who contribute $250 will receive both "Money Luck" and "Bower". Donors who contribute $500 or more will receive their choice of "Money Luck" or "Bower" beautifully framed!
This is our old location, down in the basement We'd have to have sidewalk sales just so people would notice us.
This is our new location. We have the entire first floor! The left hand side under the sign is our showroom and gallery. The right hand side is our workroom, open to the street. Lots of people strolling by stop and peer in to look at our merchandise or see our staff at work building frames.
Update: New rewards have been added for our generous contributors; see below!
Baldwin Hill Art & Framing is an independent custom picture framing shop located in downtown Natick, MA, about 15 miles west of Boston. We have been delighting customers with creative frame designs since 2006. We also offer digital imaging services, giclee printing, photo restoration, original artwork, jewelry, and prints.
Recently, we moved to a beautiful new location. Our old shop was down in a basement with limited visibility, while the new place is right at street level with huge windows and lots of foot traffic. It's wonderful, but the increased business is testing the limits of our equipment. Much of our equipment is suitable for a small studio that does only a few frames per week -- which is what we were when we first started out! Now that we need to produce serious volume, we need some upgrades:
Board & Glass Cutter: $2000. ACHIEVED! THANK YOU! Also known as a "wall cutter", this tool sits on a wall and is used to cut large square stock such as matboards, foamcore, and glass. Keeping the cuts absolutely square and straight is crucial, and the one we have does not do a very good job of this. It has a number of design flaws and it easily falls out of adjustment (not surprisingly, it's not being made any more). We need to get the model we *should* have gotten from the outset.
Miter Saw: $4000: This is the heart of the business. This is the tool that we use to cut picture frame moulding to perfect 45 degree angles so they join up to form a nice, tight 90-degree corner with no gaps or tears. Our current set-up consists of a miter saw (the kind you get at Home Depot) with an 11-foot measuring scale bed. This has seen better days and has been through several shop moves. It's been banged around and is no longer giving us the accuracy we need, so we spend extra time touching up imperfect corners when instead we could be building more frames. We would like to replace this with a miter saw specifically made for the picture framing industry, designed from the outset for accurate miter cuts.
Digital Imaging Workstation: $2000: In addition to custom framing we also do digital imaging. We do photo printing, digital photo restoration, and reproductions of artwork for artists ("giclee prints"). We have a reputation for producing prints with incredible color accuracy such that it's often nearly impossible to tell the original from the print. Unfortunately, the monitor on our digital imaging workstation is not professional-grade; some colors it reproduces better than others. The end result is that it can take multiple proofing passes to achieve color accuracy to our standards. A proper professional-grade monitor is over $1000. The remainder of this will be used to perform some much-deferred maintenance on our main printer.
Improved lighting for showroom and workroom: $1500. The current store has 100% track lighting. This is great for shining spotlights on artwork, but not so good for places like the design counter and workroom, where bright, diffuse light that fills the room is more desirable. We need to bring in an electrician to wire in suitable fixtures for our needs
Miscellaneous small tools and other items: $500
With these improvements we should be able to greatly increase our throughput, delivering more jobs at better quality with shorter turnaround times.
To thank our contributors for their generosity, anyone who contributes $50 or more will receive an equivalent gift card to our store, good for any framing or digital imaging service. Give $50, get a $50 gift card. Give $100 and get a $100 gift card! You can use your gift card yourself, or you can give it as a holiday gift!
In addition, donors who contribute $75 will receive a print of our very own wealth mascot "Money Luck" by Natick artist Tamu. "Money Luck" depicts a stylized arowana fish. The Chinese consider the arowana a sign of prosperity as their round gold scales resemble gold coins.
Donors who contribute $100 or more will receive a print of the painting "Bower" by Tamu. This lovely painting depicts two stylized creatures nestled in their dwelling place, suffused with a beautiful golden light:
Donors who contribute $250 will receive both "Money Luck" and "Bower". Donors who contribute $500 or more will receive their choice of "Money Luck" or "Bower" beautifully framed!
This is our old location, down in the basement We'd have to have sidewalk sales just so people would notice us.
This is our new location. We have the entire first floor! The left hand side under the sign is our showroom and gallery. The right hand side is our workroom, open to the street. Lots of people strolling by stop and peer in to look at our merchandise or see our staff at work building frames.
Organizer
Jim Paradis
Organizer
