Gorgeous Antique Frame

Hello again.  I wanted to post up one of my recent finds.  Since I'm always on the hunt for something old to make fabulous.  I came across this frame almost by accident.  You see, there is a little antique store by my 'day job' that I've been trying to get into and check out for a couple of months but were always closed.  So one fine day I decided to call ahead to see if they were open and it just so happened that they were that day.  I drove over and was disappointed to find a half empty antique store. The shop owner said his reason for closing was that he was tired of being in the retail business for over 20 years and he didn't want to renew his lease so he was taking a couple months off.  He was in the process of putting all his antiques into boxes and shipping them off to storage.  There were still some antiques that hadn't made their way into boxes so while I was looking around, of course, something shiny and gold caught my eye right away.  I noticed this very pretty and ornate gold frame.  It was a good size and when I went to pick it up it was very heavy.  The owner of the shop told me it was an 18th century picture frame made of bronze and he would let it go for $75.00.  I immediately put it down, even though it was very pretty I didn't have $75.00 to pay for just 1 picture frame, no matter how antique it was.  I asked him if he had anything in the $20 or less range hoping that he wouldn't laugh at me or ask me to leave.  He went to the back of his store into a tiny little room almost like a closet and said I could have this for $10.00.  Once I saw it my mouth dropped.

If you look carefully there are 6 ornate metal pieces all around the frame and there is pretty scroll work design all around behind, what looked like to me, paper. 

I started to prep this piece at first not knowing what was in store.  I noticed that besides being very dirty it was very wobbly.  I started to hammer the nails that were starting to stick out to reinforce it and that pretty much did the trick. 

I then started to clean the frame, I was using a sanding block to take off the paper that custom frame shops us when someone uses a frame to hold a piece of art with a matte. 

As I did this I wasn't taking notice of the fact that I was taking off some of the paper that held the scroll work.

I was a bit bummed that I had just done that, so I carefully folded it back in its place and will eventually need to use glue to stop it from ripping any further.   Now check out this frame carefully and take notice of its details.  Isn't it worthy of the word G-O-R-G-E-O-U-S?

 

I'm putting this post up because I am looking for some advice on refinishing this piece.  Since the ornaments are made of metal, I thought about spray painting them.  However I will need to spray paint them on the frame because I can't take them off.  As you'll see in this picture that it has what looks like a washer however its small and its embedded into the wood frame.  So I would have to cut into the frame to gain access to the washer.  To me, its not worth it to try since I may just damage the entire frame.

  As for the scroll work that is covered up by this paper, I was thinking of painting over it, but I think that it would hide the scroll detail.  So now I'm thinking of perhaps a gold rub or leafing would work in exposing the scroll detail on this frame.  I'm not entirely certain on how to go about it.  I'm open to all your advice for this.  But just to give you a brief description of my vision in my head of how I would like for it to look like.  I see the ornate pieces as silver and gold on the scroll work and its all enclosed with a nice piece of shiny mirror.  Can you see it?  Can you envision it with me?  Drop me a line on what I should do. Thanks a million for all your help.  Oh yeah that purdy ol' table that the frame is resting up against is my latest greatest. I'll post all about that in a bit.