Adjustable Columnar Frame for Grids

Progress update: I am rounding the corner on the second prototype of the adjustable columnar frames!

Over the weekend I mapped out how many more steps were needed to complete the task and took a deep breath. My kitchen will not be fully usable for traditional cooking until Jan 2026. For now I will share the space with clamps and wood frames drying at different stages in preparation. I do have a workspace with a chop saw on my porch, but it is not climate controlled and wouldn't be great for the pieces given the changes in temperature and humidity throughout the day.

View of my kitchen island over the weekend. Post-coffee pep talk via charting progress and remaining steps to help myself reset expectations of how long it will take to fabricate each of these framing systems. ETA Jan 2026!

But this morning before work, I took advantage of the recently glued frame support to test out the wood shims and spacing of the canvases for the first of 8 columns in this gridded work.

Frame support: Each member has been hand cut, glued, and clamped together to dry. Today was the first day that one was complete.

Friction fit balsa wood members help create spacers for the canvas to sit within the frame.

By cutting the balsa wood shims tight and hand sanding them to friction fit, they balance the need to move up and down the framing system while staying in place to put pressure on the canvas. Since the canvases do not have a uniform sizing (many are as much as a 1/2" wider than the others in one dimension, I needed a system that could adjust to different individual tiles. Another benefit of this strategy is that the columnar frame can be used for any of the tiled artworks I've been working on over the past year, all I have to do is swap out the canvases and adjust the wood shims.

After testing the mockup, I discovered that if the uppermost canvas wasn't super tight top to bottom, it would be prone to rotating out of the system. I went to my stash of velcro in the studio to see if it could be just enough to hold the canvas in place.

This works great! Velcro self adhesive dots on the inside of the canvas frame, and another Velcro tab on the outside connect the two pieces together. Totally adjustable for swapping out different tiles. The wood shims are tight enough to stay in place and put pressure on the top of the canvas, all except for the top one, where the cumulative tolerances are made up.

Two column frames side by side. Note how the length of canvas top to bottom varies along the 4 rows. The column on the right eliminates a spacer at the top to allow for the tolerance difference.

Same frames with more space in between. Two down; six more to make!