After Sarah and I spent a few weeks on and off putting together a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of candies and treats we decided to glue it together and frame it up the way my grandfather used to. No picture frame besides a home made candy frame, could appropriately complement this bepuzzled piece of art. So, we put this together.

First, I picked out a piece of trim at home depot (seen here) which had a sort of candy cane effect. No wood stains could really create the vividness of the colors on a candy cane and wood stain would also bleed from rope to rope. The solution, we found, was to use sharpies. We tested out patterns with an assortment of sharpies and after mitering the trim pieces we carefully colored in each bubble of the trim. Afterwards I applied seven coats of polyurethane to the trim pieces to give them that real edible candy look. I also cut four backing pieces out of 1/2″ square dowels to lend support to the frame and colored them blue.

My local hardware store was able to cut me a 1/4″ sheet of plexiglass to the size I needed. It cost $24 as I recall. The trim pieces are glued to the plexi using loctite premium. Great care needs to be taken to clean the loctite up as one proceeds because it dries a light brown poo color; which can really distract from the beauty of a nice art piece.

The frame is backed with 1/4″ hardboard which made installing picture mounts difficult. Most all picture frame mounts come with nails that extend beyond the thickness of the hardboard and my frame was too narrow to catch a nail well. After the frame took much abuse falling from the wall and other such devastating events I finally scraped off my many layers of JB Weld and loctite, bought the more heavy duty screw-in canvas hangers which come with self tapping screws, JB welded them on to the hardboard, neatly added cardboard spacers for the screws and screwed that bitch together never to fall again.