Avoid Over Cutting When You're Framing a Picture

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, what you need to practice on though is, you don't want to do over cuts. So, that's where it takes practice. So, I've taken this picture and it's kind of boring just like that. So, what I'm going to do is, I want to take something out of this picture and maybe cut over here. I think that cactus looks really cool. So, in the kit, you have lots of different designs that you could use. So, you take the tracing paper that's in the kit, you put it on here. I've traced the cactus because I want to put the cactus there. I want to do the cactus, so what I do is, I turn the mat upside down. So what you do is, you go on the other side and you trace where you've already traced your image. This one is going to be pretty easy. So, now I have the cactus on my mat. Okay, so now I take the Alto and the one thing you want to be sure of is this is on bevel. So, you want to make sure that your bevel is going the right direction. What that means is, this, behind the bevel is what's going to be on the inside and it's what's going to fall out. What I do is, I just follow the line. It's real simple. Make sure your blade is nice and sharp. And again, this takes a lot of practice. In the one I showed you a while ago, she cut this mat behind me after she'd only been working about a year in framing. So, you can learn this just in a couple of days; you'll be able to do these really neat designs. And again, I took this design directly from the picture itself. So, I'm going to cut. You can actually take it out while you are cutting. It's real easy to put right back in, and it stays on your bevel. It fell right out. So, now you have a cactus, but you have a white cactus and you really wanted a green cactus. So, remember all of these mat boards that we've got. I have a really pretty green here. So I take my razor blade and all I do is I just score the top of this piece of mat and then I just peel just the top layer of that mat off. I can put that right underneath there and now I have a beautiful green cactus to go with my picture."