Lucky me has a showing of my keys in the Pomegranate Gallery at Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon in December. In preparation for that show I have been framing some of my keys. While on the hunt for frames I found some very nice fancy gold frame trimmed shadow boxes at Home Sense and thought - hmm, this will be perfect! I set about making some keys to fit the shadowboxes I bought - something I don’t do, what I do do is just let the keys be what they want to be and if they need to fit into a frame (a rare occurrence) then they do.

I spent a long time working on Key 2769 ( a lot of trying this and trying that and adding more to make the whole thing work together) and I am very happy with the end result. I am not good at framing so I have a tendency to do that slowly (i.e. I procrastinate out of fear) and work on framing bit by bit. Key 2769 is so heavy that it needed to be mounted on a birch panel. This worked well with the shadow box. First I figured out where to place the key and marked a few drill holes for the fishing line I used to secure the key. I covered the panel in black flocking, cut away some of the flocking so that I could use E6000 glue to hold the key directly to the board, and then tied fishing line around a few places for extra security. I should have probably used wire for that because if the glue doesn’t hold I’m pretty sure the fishing line won’t do the trick (on other, lighter keys it would but likely not on this one). I then hot glued the panel into the shadow box.

The big gear in Key 2769 is from the cash register I took apart last summer. The gold cutlery is a Facebook Marketplace find, and the jewellery bits that didn’t come from my stash are from the last few minutes of a garages sale where I was lucky enough to get many vintage gold jewellery pieces.

Keys 2770 - 2772 were a bit of a detour…Many years ago I was making sculptures of doorways (a longish story that I will write about another time). Most of those doorways have found their way to other homes and some of them found there way to our yard. A few weeks ago when I was cleaning up the mulch in the rock garden I accidentally kicked over a doorway, prompting it to fall apart. Naturally I used the bits to make more keys!

For some reason I didn’t really document that doorway so don’t have any really clear pictures of it - it’s the tall piece in the trio below:

The key pictures don’t really capture the beautiful patina from the previous lives of their parts. Here are the keys that detoured out of that doorway:

Key 2773 is made from a big rusty circle piece (likely some sort of pipe connection) my husband found on the road. He also brought home two rusty rods and a rusty anchor type hook. I added in some cash register parts, jewellery bits, and a lovely red pendant that was gifted to me along with a treasure trove of other jewellery.

Key 2774 was going to be for another one of those shadow boxes…I had cut and bent some bangles to fit around the three cash register gears at the top of the key…but those bangles just wanted to be on their own (making the key look too big for the shadow box). That’s ok. It looks and feels better this way. I decided to take the pressure off and just make keys and not worry about trying to fit them into a frame. In the end this key found its way onto a frame I had used as a display board. The frame itself is from my grandmother’s house (it was a natural wood colour that I painted). The key is very light so I glued it on without any fishing line. So far so good!