How to Do the Second 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. Now, I want to put the second mat on and use a double mat. So, what I do is, I take my mat here. I turn it upside down; this is my bottom mat. I put it upside down and I take my pencil, and again, we determined that we were going to use a quarter of an inch. I want to make sure that these are going to go back exactly the way I cut them, so I make a little mark on both of them. I'm using a little quarter inch spacer. I'm putting that right in the opening and now, I can mark so that when I cut this second mat, it's going to fit underneath the top mat absolutely perfectly. So, you don't have to worry about if both outside edges were perfect, because you are going to know that the inside was perfect. So, now we have the same little marks as we had before. We are going to come back here to the mat cutter and we are going to cut this exactly like we cut the single mat; eighth of an inch past on both sides. So, it's pretty easy to do the second mat. Cut all four sides. As you can see, I'm using my hand to stop my cutter. It's just sitting back here waiting and when it comes, it just stops. And again, this one happened to fall right out, so I didn't have to use a razor blade. Now, I look on the back to see my little mark. Look on the back here, and there's my little mark, so that these mats are going to go together exactly how I laid them out. So then I use this tape; this is a double stick tape. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just put it on this mat. This is the bottom mat. What you do here is you just peel this little piece of paper off and it leaves the double stick tape on the mat. This is what you are going to do to attach the two mats so that they stay together. Again, you always want to keep your work table clean and free of debris. You don't want to have a whole bunch of tools and equipment on your work table. Now, I'm going to take my top mat and I'm just going to line it up here. I will line it up here perfectly. You don't have to take a tape measure. Then you just bang it like that, and now, we have the same picture but the matting is completely different. This one happens to be a dark mat. So, again, we are going to put the little tape...two pieces of tape...on the back and the top, turn it over, take our mat, position it. And again, we used a ready made frame for this. Now, you have a piece that looks completely different than the first piece."