Light Up Frames

Hi I'm Joe,

I'm a 26 year old guy with a life long passion for taking things apart and making anything and everything I can! After taking Design and Technology - Resistant Materials, Photography and Art at A-Level I couldn't quite decide what degree I wanted to go into at Uni as there were so many courses that I thought I'd enjoy, so I decided to work at my parents toy company (The Puppet Company - check it out!) for my gap year so I could save up some money and get my head around what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, seven years later I'm still working there and am no closer to figuring out what to do! After taking on most of the roles the company has to offer, I now do all the product photography, packaging design, website designs, catalogues, flyers, magazine adverts, POS and display stand designs, so I do know at least - that I'm still interested in designing things! My biggest design challenge came about when I recently got the keys to my first house, alongside Nicola - my girlfriend of 9 years - who I managed to annoy no end after insisting that we bought a 'fixer upper' as she doesn't have a single creative bone in her body and had never done any DIY. We both spent the next few months of being property owners working our 9-5 day jobs then coming home and tearing out the bathroom and kitchen, knocking down walls, filling up skips, re-wiring lights, sanding everything in sight and painting more surfaces than I ever thought possible. It was hard and tiering work but I loved every second of it (and I think Nicola was even beginning to enjoy it too) but now it's all done I got thinking about what the next project could be - and that's where Light Up Frames come in. My youngest sister has always known that she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up, so straight after she finished her A-Levels she was straight off to Uni to do her degree in Primary Education, before I knew it the 'baby' of the family had turned 21 and was graduating from Uni! I spent quite some time searching for an appropriate graduation gift and although I found a lot of things she'd probably have liked, I couldn't find anything that I knew she'd love, so I came to the conclusion that I'd have to make her something instead.

My uncle had recently leant me his old cutting/plotting machine to play around with and see what it could do, so I thought it could be fun to try and use this in some way and knowing her love of photos (judging by the hundreds plastered around her room at Uni) and my love of all things LED's I came up with the idea of trying to light a picture or slogan within a picture frame that she could have in her room to remind her of both me and the huge achivement she had made. I had been playing around with the cutting machine getting it to cut out words and places so you can see through the letters to photos and drawings I had placed behind, which I thought looked pretty nice so decided to go down this avenue. I bought some battery powered LED strips off of the internet and a picture frame from a local store, and got to work creating the ideal layout inside the frame to fix the LED's too so they lit the entire frame evenly. After experimenting with lots of different coloured papers and cards to use to cut the wording out from, I eventually tried using sticky back vinyl and settled on this as the material of choice as it meant that the central parts of letters like o's and e's could remain visible, whereas when you cut these out of the other materials they would fall away, seriously changing the look of the font. I settled on what the wording was going to say, cut the letters out and applied them to an additional piece of glass that also went in the frame, added the LED's and a switch and hey presto, a home made bespoke light up frame was born!

The look on my sisters face when she opened her present was priceless, and the look when she realised it lit up was even better! I was very happy with how it all turned out and didn't think too much more about it until a few her friends and friends of friends started getting in touch to see if i could make something similar for them too, and that's how Light Up Frames got started. I found an unused loft space in one of my parents warehouses, cleared out the rubbish, installed lighting and electricity, set up a work bench and created the perfect little workshop for my new business venture.

As demand and business has grown I have had to upgrade/buy my own cutting machine - which is far more accurate than my uncles old one and much much bigger, allowing me to start making frames on a bigger scale (coming soon.) I am continuing to increase the choice of colours of frames and backing vinyl to cater for all tastes and looking at ways of bringing even more creativity to the table, including being able to change the colours of individual lit words to make certain parts stand out, and introducing line drawings and shapes that can be cut out and added to your design. So that's pretty much it! I hope you like the frames I make, I'm always interested to hear peoples thoughts and feedback, so if you have any comments about anything you see on here please let me know. If you have an idea for something that isn't shown on here, then please do get in touch and I'll see what I can do! Thank you for reading, Joe Lockey Founder of Light Up Frames - Bringing your words to light.