A letter from a reader

I am 63 and the first letter I have ever written to a store is about a photo frame covered in soft white teddy fleece

Six things these plush photo frames get right that photo frames always get wrong, from a woman who does not review photo frames.

Peggy Dalton · Customer · Austin · 5 min read

I had better be square with you about who is talking. I am Peggy, I am 63, I live in Austin, Texas, with my husband Frank, and in forty years of keeping house I have never once had a single thought about a photo frame worth writing down. Frames were the thin shiny things you bought in a rush, put a photograph in, and stopped seeing within the week. So this is not a review. It is a woman who thought a photo frame could not possibly matter, saying she was wrong.

The frames I am writing about are from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly making the ordinary things a little lovelier for a few years now. They do a whole collection of plush photo frames, and I own two of them as I write this. The Elowen, which has a wide border wrapped all over in white teddy fleece, curly and soft like a teddy bear’s ear. And the Valeria, soft cream fur with little red hearts scattered through it, the sweetest thing on my bedside table by a mile.

I first saw one at a baptism lunch at the church fellowship hall, for my friend Donna’s first great-grandbaby. The other grandma had brought one as a gift, the white teddy one, with a picture of the baby already in it. It went around our whole table, hand to hand, and every woman did the same thing without thinking. Squeezed the corner of it. Nobody passes a photo frame around a table. This one got passed around twice. So I asked her, plainly, where it was from, and when the boutique later asked if they could put my letter up for other women to read, I said yes, on the condition I could be completely honest in it.

The two of mine on the sideboard, before the heart one moved to the bedroom. They do not stay put, because people keep picking them up.

Here is what forty years of photo frames taught me. They come in two piles. The thin shiny pile, silver and glass from the discount store, that all look the same and disappear on the shelf within days. And the ornate pile, heavy fancy things kept for best that cost more than the photograph deserves. I had a mantel full of the first pile, and I had stopped seeing every single one of them, including the photographs inside.

Frames you stop noticing within a week, or frames that cost more than the photo deserves. Those were the options, and I had stopped arguing with them.

These plush ones are the first frames I have owned that are neither, and having lived with mine for a while now, I can tell you it comes down to six things.

The day they came. I ordered two expecting to send them back. The return label never got printed.

1

They are soft, and that changes how you treat a photograph

Start with the thing that made a table full of women at a baptism pass a frame around like a newborn. The border is wide and deep and soft, and the moment it is in your hands you understand why the boutique bothered. You pick it up. You turn it over. You hold the photograph instead of glancing at it. In forty years, nobody has ever picked a photo frame up off my shelf, and now they do it every time someone comes over. A photograph of somebody you love, in something soft enough to hold, turns out to be a different thing altogether from the same photograph behind cold glass.

The white teddy one in my hands. You will pick it up too. Everybody does.

★★★★★

The frame gets picked up more than the TV remote. My granddaughter cuddles it, which I did not expect from a photo frame.

Margaret W., Junction

2

The white teddy one has lifted the whole mantel

The Elowen stands on my mantel now, in among frames I have had for twenty years, and it has quietly shown every one of them up. That wide soft white border does something the thin shiny ones never did. It makes the photograph look chosen. Deliberate. Like something a person decided to display rather than something that ended up there. Visitors’ eyes go straight to it, and then to the photograph in it, which is rather the point of a photo frame when you think about it. I had honestly forgotten that was the point.

On the mantel, making the rest of my frames look like they should apologize.

★★★★★

It is the first thing anyone comments on when they come in. My other frames have been demoted to the guest room.

Jean H., Menard

3

The heart one is for the photograph you love most

The Valeria is a different mood altogether. Soft cream fur with little red hearts scattered through it, and it sits on my bedside table with a photograph of Frank and me on the porch swing in it, taken years ago. It is the last thing I see at night and I am not the least bit embarrassed to say so. Some photographs are not for the mantel and the visitors. They are for you. The heart one seems to have been made with exactly that in mind, and if you have a photograph like that in a drawer somewhere, you already know which one it is.

The heart one on my bedside table. That photograph lived in a drawer for eleven years. It does not any more.

★★★★★

I put a photo of my late husband in the heart one and it sits by my bed. I should have given that photograph a real home years ago.

Dorothy A., Sonora

The plush frames, against the frames you have been buying

You can pick up a thin silver frame for a few dollars anywhere, and I have spent forty years doing exactly that. Here is the difference, laid out plainly.

About the price

The frames are $37.95 for the smallest size, rising to $47.95 for the largest, down from $76.00 and $96.00, and that goes across the whole collection, the teddy one, the heart one and all the rest.

I will pass on what the boutique told me, which is that this is the sale run before the first fall stock, and once a design sells through, that is that. Their words, not mine. What I can tell you from my side is that half price is usually where I start asking what is wrong with a thing, and after weeks of daily handling, one baptism and an inspection by every woman who has been through my living room since, I have not found it.

And I do not trust perfect scores, so I read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them across the collection, sitting at 4.2 stars, which sounded like real women rather than robots, so I read on. The same six things I have just walked you through come up in them, over and over, in other women’s words.

One ends up on the kitchen windowsill in the end. I am told this happens in every house.

If the photographs you love most are sitting in frames you stopped seeing years ago, or worse, in a drawer, this is where I would start. Go and look at the collection while the designs are all still there, and start with the person you would want to pick up.

Peggy

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• A wide soft plush border you pick up without thinking
• The white teddy Elowen and the red heart Valeria
• Four sizes, matched to five to eight inch photo paper
• Stands on its own on any shelf, mantel or bedside table
• A whole collection of designs, one for every room
• The easiest gift for anyone who owns a photograph
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