DIY Matting & Framing

This was seriously a new challenge for me, and I'm not gonna lie - I found it quite difficult.

I preach that when you are doing a DIY project you cannot expect perfection, but I still want things to turn out really nice!  And this project was hard to accomplish that for sure.  If you remember {from this post} I found some decorations The Sailor had that were really cool looking but horribly framed. So, this past week I decided to mat and re-frame them.

Well, they were not normal sizes at all!  Getting a frame is easy enough, it just has to be bigger than what you're framing, lol.  But then to fill the gap between the picture/certificate you have to get a mat that fits.  Well, those didn't exist for the two things I was framing, so I had to custom cut them - and this was the part that was not fun.

Personal Photo -
The pictures how The Sailor had framed them (lol), the
new frames, the mattes, and the cutting supplies.

For the first one, a cartoon-ish picture of a jet that The Sailor used to work on that was signed by the artist, at least I was able to buy a pre-cut mat, but then I had to make the opening bigger.  That's easy enough - measure the picture, draw out how much bigger the hole has to be, and cut it.  I used an acrylic ruler and a rotary cutter.

Personal Photos

This sounds easy enough, but seriously, those mats are freaking hard to cut, even though I have a nice rotary cutter that I take good care of.  And getting a clean cut is difficult!  I finally got it cut, and since I measured twice (to cut once {like my Dad always says, lol}) the picture fit perfectly.  Then I actually smoothed out the edges with a nail file, haha.  Hey, don't hate, it works!

Then, the second piece, which is a really cool looking certificate thing (not even sure what it's exactly for, lol {I'm a horrible Navy Wife sometimes} but its super cool looking) was so big I couldn't even find a pre-cut mat to work off of, so I just had to buy a massive poster board type thing that is actually matting material.

So first, I had to cut it down so it was the correct outside dimensions.  For that I traced the standard poster/picture that came in the frame and then just used scissors to cut it out.  Then I measured and cut out the opening in the middle the same way I did with the first piece (nail file and all).

Personal Photos

I am happy with how they turned out, it was just a lot more frustrating than I had anticipated:

Personal Photos

Now I'm one step closer to starting my gallery wall!

Do you have any tips for custom cutting framing mats in case I have to do it again in the future?

Until next time...