How to Do the First Mat of a Double-Mat Picture Frame

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, I am Debbie Reeves at John's Design Center and I am here to tell you about custom picture framing. So, now I'm going to show you how to do a double mat. So, again, this particular one we did it larger. We are going to do a sixteen by twenty. So, what we are going to do is take the top mat (the one that you see the most of) and we are going to cut that first. So, we take our tape measure and we are going to measure to find out what our margins are going to be. So, this frame is a sixteen by twenty, so we see that it is seven and three quarters. So, half of that is three and seven eighths. But, remember that we have another mat to put underneath it and this is the top mat. So, what we do is, first we put it on three and seven eighths and we decide that I'm going to use a quarter of an inch of the inside color. So I write on here "one quarter inch." Now I'm going to back this up one quarter inch. So it makes it real simple; the only number I need to know is three and seven eighths. So, I've backed it up a quarter inch for the inside mat and I've laid this out. Again, I know that my side margins are going to be a little bit different, so I put my finger on twenty, which is the size of the frame. And, it's actually nine and a quarter. So, half of that is four and five eighths. So, we put my mat guide on four and five eighths, we back it up for that quarter inch on the inside and now we lay this out. Okay, so I've put my mat into the mat cutter. This particular mat cutter cuts on a forty five. I've put the mat in about an eighth of an inch past the line. I come down about an eighth of an inch past the line. I move my bottom board here every single time so that when this blade goes through and makes a cut, it doesn't go and make a cut through the same line, which would make my cut on the mat not be nice and straight. Okay, now sometimes, the mat does not just fall out like it did the last time. So, what we do is we take a little razor blade and we pick this up, because we don't want it to rip and then it won't make a beautiful corner. That's all it took was one little tiny nip."