How To Professionally Frame Your Artwork at Home!

**Tips and Tricks for Framing at Home**

As a DIY enthusiast, framing can be a daunting task, especially when it comes to achieving professional-looking results. However, with the right tools and techniques, anyone can create beautiful and high-quality frames in the comfort of their own home. In this article, we'll share some expert tips and tricks for framing, including our favorite tools and materials.

**Choosing the Right Wire**

When it comes to hanging a frame, one of the most important decisions you'll make is choosing the right wire. We're big fans of coated wire, which is easy on the fingers and has ends that don't fray. This type of wire is perfect for framing, as it's gentle on the wall and can be easily adjusted without leaving any marks. For us, the coated wire was a game-changer – we no longer have to worry about damaging our walls or having to use complicated measuring techniques.

**Measuring Up**

Before you start hanging your frame, take a moment to measure the distance from the top edge of the frame to where you want it to hang. This is an important step, as it ensures that your nail hole is in the right spot and your frame hangs level. We like to use a simple measurement tool, such as a ruler or measuring tape, to get the job done quickly and easily.

**Protecting Your Wall**

One of the most common mistakes people make when framing is damaging their walls. To avoid this, we recommend using rubber bumpers on the back bottom corners of your frame. These small pieces of plastic are easy to apply and provide a safe barrier between the frame and your wall. Not only do they protect your wall from damage, but they also prevent the frame from shifting or moving.

**Fixing Mitered Corners**

Mitered corners can be a real challenge when framing, especially if you're new to the process. For us, using a little bit of white putty has been a lifesaver – it's easy to apply and can disguise even the largest gaps between the frame and the wall. We've also learned that with practice and patience, mitered corners don't have to be perfect; in fact, they can add a touch of character to your frame.

**The Secret to Perfect Corners**

There's one secret that we like to share with our viewers, and it's not exactly a secret – it's just a little-known trick that can make all the difference when framing. That trick is using nail hole and corner filler, a special type of paste wax that comes in a tin and can be used to blend seams and fill gaps between the frame and the wall. We've found this product to be incredibly useful, especially when it comes to creating professional-looking corners without having to use specialized equipment.

**The Final Touches**

Before you finish your frame, take a moment to apply a final coat of wax or putty to any remaining seams or gaps. This is where patience and attention to detail come in – with a little bit of elbow grease and some quality tools, you can create a finished product that's virtually invisible.

**The Finished Product**

Finally, the finished frame. With our techniques and tips, we've been able to create beautiful, high-quality frames in the comfort of our own home. From choosing the right wire to applying the perfect coat of wax, every step of the process is designed to produce a professional-looking result that's sure to impress.

**Supporting Our Channel**

As always, we're grateful for your support and encouragement. If you'd like to further support us at Tested, be sure to check out our merchandise store – we've got all sorts of fun and useful items, from demerit badges to aprons. For our original five demerit badges, which showcase some of the most common mistakes people make when framing, simply click on this link: [insert link]. And if you're feeling generous, consider picking up a special discounted bundle – we can't wait to share more tips and tricks with you in the future.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey it's jen here for tested to share some tips with you today about picture framing so for a long time in a past life when i was much younger i worked in several different picture framing shops now if you ever had artwork professionally framed you know that it can be pretty expensive and it seems like a pretty specialized process it is it is something that takes a lot of kind of fine-tuned tools and knowledge of how to actually put the pieces together but it's not that inaccessible when i worked at the frame shop i was able to take home tons and tons of scrap pieces of molding so just off-cut pieces that were left over from larger frames and i took a ton of it home with me so i have piles and piles of this stuff it's worth quite a bit of money and i wanted to make some frames out of it so over the past year i finally decided to invest in some prosumer level tools to make something out of all this frame molding that i've got uh there are a lot of different ways that you can get into this so i've got all this fancy molding these are typically like pre-finished wood sometimes they're resin a lot of times you'll get really nice decorative frame profiles and these vary in price but you can also do this in much simpler ways so i also went to the hardware store and just got some simple one by twos this is some red oak i've also got just totally plain pine and what i did with this was just to route out a channel basically using the table saw to cut a channel for the artwork so you can do this relatively inexpensively if you don't have access to frame molding so just to give you a few examples of some pieces that i've made for myself this is a print this is actually a hegel print book plate that i picked up on etsy and then i cut the mats myself cut the frame pieces and assembled this whole package at home with the scrap pieces that i have i've also done some simpler stuff just some kind of nature prince i really like this one of the beatles not those beetles these beetles and here's an example of one that i made just out of the one by twos this is a rather large poster of the bay area i'm not sure if you can even see the bottom of that there we go so this is just made from one by twos that i stained with a cherry stain and uh then wired up the back to hang on the wall the first step of pretty much the entire process is to look at your artwork and measure exactly how big you want your frame to be so i'll usually start off with my print and then i take a little bit off the edges so you don't want to have the um the mat coming right out to the outside you want it to overlap just a little bit so i'll usually leave like a quarter inch margin measure that in from the outside dimensions of the artwork and then i figure out exactly how much matte margin i want that's the space between the edge of the artwork and the outside of the frame and i use all of these dimensions to figure out exactly how big the frame itself should be so there's a couple things to keep in mind you do need to take into account the actual width of the frame itself so when you're um measuring the frame this particular kind has what's called a rabbit on the back uh this is basically the the overlap where this is going to go over the top of the the glass and your entire frame package if you were going to say route out a channel you would then measure the the thickness from the inside of that channel to the outside of the frame and the reason we do that is when you when you figure out the size of your frame window you want to make sure to account for the thickness of the material so i will go through and take all of my measurements and then figure out the width of my long and short legs of each frame i have cut these all on the miter saw i use a nice sharp 90 tooth finish blade and make sure that that angle is a perfect 45 i like to use a digital angle finder to check that and then i just go ahead and cut all of my mitered corners you can see these are these are nice and smooth the edges are they look really nice there's no tear out and this is ready to start assembling so i like to dry fit the whole frame first make sure all my corners look good before i start actually attaching anything and in a frame shop typically you would have a pretty perfect 45 there's not not a lot of margin for error i am using a you know kind of hobbyist miter saw with not a perfect blade so i'm going to get a little bit of blade deflection my corners are not going to be perfect but that looks good enough to me so i'm going to now apply some glue as a precursor to putting in the actual hardware in the frame shop you would usually use some type of wood or framing glue that will seep into the fibers of the wood and create a pretty strong hold there are specialized clamps that are used for holding these miters they're really expensive they have kind of padded jaws so you can hold everything in there and it holds your entire frame so that everything's at a perfect 45. i have yet to invest in those clamps so there's a couple ways you can go there are smaller corner clamps these are just meant for basic woodworking and these will work for positioning on your frame corners for a frame this size i actually like to just do this by hand so i will i will kind of glue and position these without using any clamps and kind of just eyeball it and hopefully get everything as as square as possible so in the frame shop we would just use wood glue for the purposes of this video i'm going to speed things up a little bit and add a little bit of super glue just so that it can grab a little faster so i'll glue opposite corners first so i'm going to do one one group of legs and another group of legs over here and if you are using a frame that has any type of finish on it you want to take a minute here to actually add a little bit of kind of clean up on the corner so this one is white and you can see the the edge here is nice and clean but on a picture frame that has some uh finish on it like this is a cherry type of finish there's not really anything on the edge the wood grain goes right up to the edge here so there's a little trick when i'm joining a frame like this i will use wood markers these are just furniture finishing markers and mark the edges of my miters and this will prevent any of the wood from showing if your join isn't perfect you won't be able to see that highlight of the wood in there so i just mark the very edges on all four of my corners once my corners are joined and glued i can then bring them over to this next device which is used for adding hardware to the back of the frames now like i mentioned there's a lot of different ways that you can do this professional sort of carpenters will make really nice frames out of wood and cut the rabbit with router and you can use splines to join the corners you can also just use finishing nails so if you've got some unfinished wood you can glue these corners up and shoot some finishing nails they're virtually invisible and they're pretty stable i will sometimes reinforce them with additional hardware on the back for a finish molding like this i don't want the hardware to be visible i want the the fastener to go completely unnoticed behind the frame so the easiest way to do that is with something called a v-nail and it's basically a tiny little nail that's shaped like a v and it's got some dimension to it and it goes into the back almost like a staple through your miter joint and it holds everything together because the glue by itself is not going to hold that frame for forever there's a couple different kinds of v-nails you have different thicknesses and different dimensions there's also soft and hard v-nails for different types of wood and you can join a couple of v-nails into the back of the frame so depending on the width of your molding you can do a stack-up of a few v-nails at once in a frame shop they use a tool called an underpinner it's a huge pneumatic machine and you put your joined corners in and usually step on a foot pedal and it shoots this v-nail into the underneath side of the frame super quickly very powerful and also very expensive so instead of investing in a multiple thousand dollar machine and a whole air compression system i have this little manual tool that does the job just fine this is called a pro joiner this is made by a framing company called logan and this is the model f 300-2 so what this does is i can put the frame corners into the machine load a v-nail and then manually pull it on this lever and it will gently press that nail into the back of the molding so no air compressing compression involved it's all just using leverage to get that to um to fasten but it works pretty well and i found it to be fairly reliable so once i have the the pieces glued i'm going to carefully bring this over to the v-nailer so i position the molding corner in the back of the v-nailer and i'm tightening this knob here just enough to grab the frame and hold it in that position i also want to set the position of the sort of presser foot here this has got a rubber plate on it and i can adjust that using this lever here and i want that presser foot to be positioned just about over the center of the molding so in this case it's pretty easy if you have a wider molding or a molding with kind of a more decorative profile it can be a little bit more difficult but you just want it to be evenly positioned so that where the v-nail is going in it's applying even pressure from the top so i can tighten that down and then i also want to set the depth so when i push this all the way down i want the handle to be just a little bit below horizontal i'm then going to apply the v-nails to this v-nail block so this has one permanent position and one sliding position and if i'm going to use multiple v-nails i can use both of these blocks here i'm going to go with we'll go with some 3 8 inch hard v nails so these just get installed in the v-nail block there is a upward facing part there's kind of um if you look very closely at the v-nails there's almost like a blade on one side of them and that's the side that goes up so these just get positioned in the v-nail block and then that goes underneath the whole apparatus make sure that's nice and tight and now i can go ahead and gently pull this lever all right so there we have it that is a one v-nail fastener in the back this corner isn't quite perfect but we can fix that later so i'm gonna go ahead and join the second corner and then we can put the whole thing together so i've got two of the frame corners joined now i'm going to go ahead and finish with the last two corners if i'm lucky everything will stay mostly square but i can also kind of stretch it and and torque it so that it fits nice and nice and tight keep those corners good now i can see that these aren't perfect joins i know for certain that with my miter saw i'm getting a little bit of blade deflection which will happen if you're not using a professional framing blade in this case it's going to be totally fine because i can feel the cracks and kind of hide those crimes later but i will say in a professional frame shop these corners would not be passable this is just for my for myself for home so i'm not too worried about it all right i'm going to give that a little spritz with some accelerator we got a little drifting here so those corners feel good enough i'm going to very carefully because now i've got oh there we go i've got the weight of the frame pulling in both directions so i want to make sure to do this really gently and i might need a little bit more glue again this works best if you're using the wood glue and a proper clamp setup you would set it up overnight at least let that glue cure fully and then you're just attaching the fastener as kind of reinforcement at that point right now i am sort of fudging this just to make it happen quickly and the frame is pretty small it's pretty lightweight so there's not going to be a lot of force pulling down on these corners all right so we have our completed frame mostly completed and i framed up this artwork i matted this artwork so this is just a poster arizograph that i got uh online and i cut a custom mat for this so i just bought a piece of matboard and i have a special machine also made by that company called logan that has an angled blade that will cut this really nice sharp bevel that you see all the way around so there's a little bit of measuring infractions involved in figuring out exactly how to get the sizes for this but basically it's like i said the the artwork plus your matte margin and you're calculating a little bit of extra of overlap because you want the edge of the mat to go over at the edge of your artwork now map board isn't strictly necessary you will hear a lot of frame shots talk about the need for it you don't typically want your glass or your plexiglass touching the surface of your artwork it's good to have just that tiny little bit of a lift off of there especially if you have something like a photograph the emulsion can stick to the glass with any type of humidity so having the mat in there will protect your artwork with framing it's also really important to use archival acid-free materials the non-acid-free stuff is definitely cheaper but if you care about your artwork if it's a document something that's irreplaceable it's definitely worth investing in the acid-free stuff typical papers have binders that have acid and lignans in them that can over time will deteriorate your artwork when working in the frame shop we definitely saw lots of older you know prints and things come in and you can actually see the border of where the non-acid-free materials yellowed and deteriorated that over time it can take 10 years or more for that to happen but again if it's you're taking the time to frame something and it's something that you care about it's worth having the materials that aren't going to actually damage it over time so i cut a piece of archival mat for this um and i also cut a piece of plexiglass these are pretty inexpensive you can get at a local plastic store um frame shops will sometimes also cut these for you just cut a piece of glass or plexi so you can get that cut to your specific size so in order to assemble this whole package i'm going to create kind of i call it the sandwich which is your your artwork your mat your backing board and also your plexiglass so what i've done here is attach the artwork to a piece of archival foam board i've got the matte board on top and now i'm just going to put this piece of plexi on top of the whole sandwich now plexi and glass are going to pick up some static charge especially as i peel back this plastic protective film that's going to create lots of static on the surface and want to pick up everything from your surrounding environment so as much as possible i'm trying not to get my fingers on top of this all right you can already see i can see there's all sorts of dust and hair and anything in this room that's wanting to stick to this so the easiest way to clear off any of this debris as with a compressed you know a compressed air gun i wouldn't recommend using the desktop canned air anywhere near your artwork because if you have it at an angle and it starts to get the condensation you can actually damage your print so if you're going to use the canned air make sure you do this far away from your artwork but i've actually got an air compressor here with an air gun so i'm going to do the artwork first all right close enough and we'll see we'll see if i missed anything all right now there's definitely some on the top another thing you want to be careful of if you're using glass is anything like windex windex is great for glass but it is super not archival so if you've gone to all the trouble to get acid-free materials and then you spritz it with windex you're just putting all those chemicals right back into that environment so this looks pretty good um you can get kind of as obsessive as you want to about catching all the dust just remember that once this is sealed you're going to be looking at that forever i will show you a little trick this is a framing secret if you have a stubborn piece of dust instead of opening the whole thing back up and introducing more into the environment you can use a little piece of tape with the sticky side up and just lift up the one area where you're seeing a piece of dirt so like i've got a little piece in here so i'm just going to very carefully lift up that corner and slide the tape underneath until it sticks to that piece of dust and then i can pull it right out all right that looks good enough to me so then i will put the frame i like to put the frame over the top and slide the sandwich in from the back because then i know i'm not introducing anything new into that environment so it's a nice snug fit all right now the next part once this is in there and you can double check make sure that no no dust sometimes dust from the inside of the frame will sneak in there but i think this looks pretty good okay so i've got this in the frame it's mostly dust free i always double check after i put the the whole sandwich together because sometimes dust from the actual framing will get into the sandwich there but it looks it looks pretty good and the next step is to actually attach the artwork into the the frame uh border so for that i'm going to use a tool called a framing point gun this is made by that same company logan that makes most of the framing stuff that i've got and this basically just drives a flat pointed little tab into the side of the frame it's totally invisible from the outside but it will hold this whole sandwich kind of press it towards the front and keep everything nice and secure so there's a couple different varieties of points really there's just two kinds there's um rigid and flexible the flexible ones are good if you ever think you might need to take the the piece out like say you have a diploma or something that you might want to put in a different frame or change out for something else the flexible points will attach into the frame and you can always bend them back and out of the way the rigid points are a little more permanent so i'm going to load some points into the gun which just press that and that opens up the cartridge here there's actually already some points in there if you can see that and then basically this little ridge here you just push that up against the back of the frame and there you go it's satisfying all right so that's the back now the artwork is nice and secure that's not going to go anywhere just making sure that all that dust is still on the outside it looks good and we're ready to attach the final step which is the backing so on the back of the frame you could leave this open but we've gone to all the trouble to make everything nice and archival and sort of sealed from the environment so the last step is to put a dust cover over the back of this and kind of fully close up that whole package so for that i'm just using some brown paper and you want to make sure this is archival as well the frame on top of that and i'm going to use some tape this is um this is just a crafting variety but typically you would use something called atg tape and it comes in a big gun like this advanced tape glider this is what they use in the frame shop and this stuff is also acid-free adhesive i've got the small version here and you basically just apply some glue it's sort of um a thin tape like adhesive that will grab to the backing paper and then just position that on there all right then we can trim off the excess there is another specialized tool for this called a dust cover trimmer that you can get it's basically just a a mount for a straight a straight razor blade that will cut the edge nice and flush along the back so there we go got a nice dust cover that looks super super clean and professional on the back so while we're back here i'll show you how to attach some hanging hardware i will use d-ring hangers which are these little guys here and these just screw into the back of the frame molding and then you can string a wire across the back so i like to measure a few inches from the top of the frame now depending on the size of your frame if you get a really big piece you would want uh you know you'd want a little bit more distance from the top and my frame molding ends like here so i'm going to just drill a pilot hole i've got a little tape flag on there to make sure that i don't go too deep into the frame all right and then some framing wire i really like this coated wire this is really easy on the fingers and the ends don't fray and just give a little bit of a tail there pull that nice and taut all right got our wire on there one thing i like to do for myself for hanging is i'll pull this up to kind of as far as it goes and measure the distance to the top edge of the frame so it looks like i've got about two and a half inches and then i will just rate two and a half at the top that way i know when i go to hang this i can make a mark where the top edge of the frame is and i know that i need my nail hole to go at that distance last thing are some rubber bumpers these little clear adhesive bumpers that go on the back bottom corners and this just protects your wall and also make sure that the frame doesn't shift at all once it's hanging all right so that's looking pretty good there is one thing that i want to fix now as i mentioned before my mitered corners are well they leave something to be desired let's just say white is probably the least forgiving this flat white profile because there's nothing to distract your eye from seeing these big gaps again in a professional frame shop these corners would probably be mostly invisible because you'd have a proper saw and a proper blade but i can totally hide these crimes and make it work with what i have there's another secret that i can show you and this is sort of a it's not that much of a secret in frame shops but it's really useful it's a little sort of a paste wax that comes in a tin it's called nail hole and corner filler and they come in a variety of different colors and finishes and it's basically just a hard wax this never really dries and you can use this in the corners of your frame to kind of blend any of those seams and make them virtually invisible so for this frame i'm going to go with a white finish obviously but there are other colors so there's um different metallics i've got gold and silver here they also have different um wood grain uh colors so they've got like walnut and cherry and you can mix them together so if you've got a frame that's sort of a dark gold like this one for example i've actually mixed black with the gold and i just keep them in these uh to go sort of salad container cups and then anytime i need that that finish i've already got that pre-mixed the reason i save this step for last is because if you apply this wax and any of it gets onto your work surface any of those little waxy pieces you can get it on your glass or even worse you can get it on your artwork so i wait until the frame is fully sealed up everything is closed and then i bring out the wax as the finishing step so i'm going to use a bigger popsicle stick here and you basically just scrape out a little bit and the same way you would apply like a wood filler or epoxy you just sort of wipe it into that crevice and you can already see how well it's disguising that seam all right so all the corners are kind of filled in with wax and i'm just going to go ahead and wipe off all the excess all right there it is so that is a finished picture frame you almost can't tell that my corners were less than perfect that that uh white putty really does some magic and i have to say that's that's the reason i haven't felt compelled to upgrade my saw because i can totally get away with it but here is uh here's a pretty nice looking piece of art it's all nice and finished in the back and i'm very pleased with the finished product i hope that this has given you some ideas for tips for framing stuff at home you can check out links for a lot of these tools in the video description good luck with all your home framing projects and we'll see you next time thank you guys for watching that video if you'd like to further support us at tested you can do so by buying some merch from us in our store a link is below but i wanted to tell you that for the first time we are releasing a discounted bundle of tested merch specifically our original five demerit badges these are ways in which every maker screws up so we've got the measure once cursed twice uh releasing the mysterious blue smoke from electronics and stopping them from working breaking a drill bit uh 3d printer going all flag spaghetti monster on you and my personal most common one cutting your finger yeah get yourself over to testeddashstore.com and line yourself up with some demerit badges i'm going to sew these to my apron oh that actually would make a good one day buildhey it's jen here for tested to share some tips with you today about picture framing so for a long time in a past life when i was much younger i worked in several different picture framing shops now if you ever had artwork professionally framed you know that it can be pretty expensive and it seems like a pretty specialized process it is it is something that takes a lot of kind of fine-tuned tools and knowledge of how to actually put the pieces together but it's not that inaccessible when i worked at the frame shop i was able to take home tons and tons of scrap pieces of molding so just off-cut pieces that were left over from larger frames and i took a ton of it home with me so i have piles and piles of this stuff it's worth quite a bit of money and i wanted to make some frames out of it so over the past year i finally decided to invest in some prosumer level tools to make something out of all this frame molding that i've got uh there are a lot of different ways that you can get into this so i've got all this fancy molding these are typically like pre-finished wood sometimes they're resin a lot of times you'll get really nice decorative frame profiles and these vary in price but you can also do this in much simpler ways so i also went to the hardware store and just got some simple one by twos this is some red oak i've also got just totally plain pine and what i did with this was just to route out a channel basically using the table saw to cut a channel for the artwork so you can do this relatively inexpensively if you don't have access to frame molding so just to give you a few examples of some pieces that i've made for myself this is a print this is actually a hegel print book plate that i picked up on etsy and then i cut the mats myself cut the frame pieces and assembled this whole package at home with the scrap pieces that i have i've also done some simpler stuff just some kind of nature prince i really like this one of the beatles not those beetles these beetles and here's an example of one that i made just out of the one by twos this is a rather large poster of the bay area i'm not sure if you can even see the bottom of that there we go so this is just made from one by twos that i stained with a cherry stain and uh then wired up the back to hang on the wall the first step of pretty much the entire process is to look at your artwork and measure exactly how big you want your frame to be so i'll usually start off with my print and then i take a little bit off the edges so you don't want to have the um the mat coming right out to the outside you want it to overlap just a little bit so i'll usually leave like a quarter inch margin measure that in from the outside dimensions of the artwork and then i figure out exactly how much matte margin i want that's the space between the edge of the artwork and the outside of the frame and i use all of these dimensions to figure out exactly how big the frame itself should be so there's a couple things to keep in mind you do need to take into account the actual width of the frame itself so when you're um measuring the frame this particular kind has what's called a rabbit on the back uh this is basically the the overlap where this is going to go over the top of the the glass and your entire frame package if you were going to say route out a channel you would then measure the the thickness from the inside of that channel to the outside of the frame and the reason we do that is when you when you figure out the size of your frame window you want to make sure to account for the thickness of the material so i will go through and take all of my measurements and then figure out the width of my long and short legs of each frame i have cut these all on the miter saw i use a nice sharp 90 tooth finish blade and make sure that that angle is a perfect 45 i like to use a digital angle finder to check that and then i just go ahead and cut all of my mitered corners you can see these are these are nice and smooth the edges are they look really nice there's no tear out and this is ready to start assembling so i like to dry fit the whole frame first make sure all my corners look good before i start actually attaching anything and in a frame shop typically you would have a pretty perfect 45 there's not not a lot of margin for error i am using a you know kind of hobbyist miter saw with not a perfect blade so i'm going to get a little bit of blade deflection my corners are not going to be perfect but that looks good enough to me so i'm going to now apply some glue as a precursor to putting in the actual hardware in the frame shop you would usually use some type of wood or framing glue that will seep into the fibers of the wood and create a pretty strong hold there are specialized clamps that are used for holding these miters they're really expensive they have kind of padded jaws so you can hold everything in there and it holds your entire frame so that everything's at a perfect 45. i have yet to invest in those clamps so there's a couple ways you can go there are smaller corner clamps these are just meant for basic woodworking and these will work for positioning on your frame corners for a frame this size i actually like to just do this by hand so i will i will kind of glue and position these without using any clamps and kind of just eyeball it and hopefully get everything as as square as possible so in the frame shop we would just use wood glue for the purposes of this video i'm going to speed things up a little bit and add a little bit of super glue just so that it can grab a little faster so i'll glue opposite corners first so i'm going to do one one group of legs and another group of legs over here and if you are using a frame that has any type of finish on it you want to take a minute here to actually add a little bit of kind of clean up on the corner so this one is white and you can see the the edge here is nice and clean but on a picture frame that has some uh finish on it like this is a cherry type of finish there's not really anything on the edge the wood grain goes right up to the edge here so there's a little trick when i'm joining a frame like this i will use wood markers these are just furniture finishing markers and mark the edges of my miters and this will prevent any of the wood from showing if your join isn't perfect you won't be able to see that highlight of the wood in there so i just mark the very edges on all four of my corners once my corners are joined and glued i can then bring them over to this next device which is used for adding hardware to the back of the frames now like i mentioned there's a lot of different ways that you can do this professional sort of carpenters will make really nice frames out of wood and cut the rabbit with router and you can use splines to join the corners you can also just use finishing nails so if you've got some unfinished wood you can glue these corners up and shoot some finishing nails they're virtually invisible and they're pretty stable i will sometimes reinforce them with additional hardware on the back for a finish molding like this i don't want the hardware to be visible i want the the fastener to go completely unnoticed behind the frame so the easiest way to do that is with something called a v-nail and it's basically a tiny little nail that's shaped like a v and it's got some dimension to it and it goes into the back almost like a staple through your miter joint and it holds everything together because the glue by itself is not going to hold that frame for forever there's a couple different kinds of v-nails you have different thicknesses and different dimensions there's also soft and hard v-nails for different types of wood and you can join a couple of v-nails into the back of the frame so depending on the width of your molding you can do a stack-up of a few v-nails at once in a frame shop they use a tool called an underpinner it's a huge pneumatic machine and you put your joined corners in and usually step on a foot pedal and it shoots this v-nail into the underneath side of the frame super quickly very powerful and also very expensive so instead of investing in a multiple thousand dollar machine and a whole air compression system i have this little manual tool that does the job just fine this is called a pro joiner this is made by a framing company called logan and this is the model f 300-2 so what this does is i can put the frame corners into the machine load a v-nail and then manually pull it on this lever and it will gently press that nail into the back of the molding so no air compressing compression involved it's all just using leverage to get that to um to fasten but it works pretty well and i found it to be fairly reliable so once i have the the pieces glued i'm going to carefully bring this over to the v-nailer so i position the molding corner in the back of the v-nailer and i'm tightening this knob here just enough to grab the frame and hold it in that position i also want to set the position of the sort of presser foot here this has got a rubber plate on it and i can adjust that using this lever here and i want that presser foot to be positioned just about over the center of the molding so in this case it's pretty easy if you have a wider molding or a molding with kind of a more decorative profile it can be a little bit more difficult but you just want it to be evenly positioned so that where the v-nail is going in it's applying even pressure from the top so i can tighten that down and then i also want to set the depth so when i push this all the way down i want the handle to be just a little bit below horizontal i'm then going to apply the v-nails to this v-nail block so this has one permanent position and one sliding position and if i'm going to use multiple v-nails i can use both of these blocks here i'm going to go with we'll go with some 3 8 inch hard v nails so these just get installed in the v-nail block there is a upward facing part there's kind of um if you look very closely at the v-nails there's almost like a blade on one side of them and that's the side that goes up so these just get positioned in the v-nail block and then that goes underneath the whole apparatus make sure that's nice and tight and now i can go ahead and gently pull this lever all right so there we have it that is a one v-nail fastener in the back this corner isn't quite perfect but we can fix that later so i'm gonna go ahead and join the second corner and then we can put the whole thing together so i've got two of the frame corners joined now i'm going to go ahead and finish with the last two corners if i'm lucky everything will stay mostly square but i can also kind of stretch it and and torque it so that it fits nice and nice and tight keep those corners good now i can see that these aren't perfect joins i know for certain that with my miter saw i'm getting a little bit of blade deflection which will happen if you're not using a professional framing blade in this case it's going to be totally fine because i can feel the cracks and kind of hide those crimes later but i will say in a professional frame shop these corners would not be passable this is just for my for myself for home so i'm not too worried about it all right i'm going to give that a little spritz with some accelerator we got a little drifting here so those corners feel good enough i'm going to very carefully because now i've got oh there we go i've got the weight of the frame pulling in both directions so i want to make sure to do this really gently and i might need a little bit more glue again this works best if you're using the wood glue and a proper clamp setup you would set it up overnight at least let that glue cure fully and then you're just attaching the fastener as kind of reinforcement at that point right now i am sort of fudging this just to make it happen quickly and the frame is pretty small it's pretty lightweight so there's not going to be a lot of force pulling down on these corners all right so we have our completed frame mostly completed and i framed up this artwork i matted this artwork so this is just a poster arizograph that i got uh online and i cut a custom mat for this so i just bought a piece of matboard and i have a special machine also made by that company called logan that has an angled blade that will cut this really nice sharp bevel that you see all the way around so there's a little bit of measuring infractions involved in figuring out exactly how to get the sizes for this but basically it's like i said the the artwork plus your matte margin and you're calculating a little bit of extra of overlap because you want the edge of the mat to go over at the edge of your artwork now map board isn't strictly necessary you will hear a lot of frame shots talk about the need for it you don't typically want your glass or your plexiglass touching the surface of your artwork it's good to have just that tiny little bit of a lift off of there especially if you have something like a photograph the emulsion can stick to the glass with any type of humidity so having the mat in there will protect your artwork with framing it's also really important to use archival acid-free materials the non-acid-free stuff is definitely cheaper but if you care about your artwork if it's a document something that's irreplaceable it's definitely worth investing in the acid-free stuff typical papers have binders that have acid and lignans in them that can over time will deteriorate your artwork when working in the frame shop we definitely saw lots of older you know prints and things come in and you can actually see the border of where the non-acid-free materials yellowed and deteriorated that over time it can take 10 years or more for that to happen but again if it's you're taking the time to frame something and it's something that you care about it's worth having the materials that aren't going to actually damage it over time so i cut a piece of archival mat for this um and i also cut a piece of plexiglass these are pretty inexpensive you can get at a local plastic store um frame shops will sometimes also cut these for you just cut a piece of glass or plexi so you can get that cut to your specific size so in order to assemble this whole package i'm going to create kind of i call it the sandwich which is your your artwork your mat your backing board and also your plexiglass so what i've done here is attach the artwork to a piece of archival foam board i've got the matte board on top and now i'm just going to put this piece of plexi on top of the whole sandwich now plexi and glass are going to pick up some static charge especially as i peel back this plastic protective film that's going to create lots of static on the surface and want to pick up everything from your surrounding environment so as much as possible i'm trying not to get my fingers on top of this all right you can already see i can see there's all sorts of dust and hair and anything in this room that's wanting to stick to this so the easiest way to clear off any of this debris as with a compressed you know a compressed air gun i wouldn't recommend using the desktop canned air anywhere near your artwork because if you have it at an angle and it starts to get the condensation you can actually damage your print so if you're going to use the canned air make sure you do this far away from your artwork but i've actually got an air compressor here with an air gun so i'm going to do the artwork first all right close enough and we'll see we'll see if i missed anything all right now there's definitely some on the top another thing you want to be careful of if you're using glass is anything like windex windex is great for glass but it is super not archival so if you've gone to all the trouble to get acid-free materials and then you spritz it with windex you're just putting all those chemicals right back into that environment so this looks pretty good um you can get kind of as obsessive as you want to about catching all the dust just remember that once this is sealed you're going to be looking at that forever i will show you a little trick this is a framing secret if you have a stubborn piece of dust instead of opening the whole thing back up and introducing more into the environment you can use a little piece of tape with the sticky side up and just lift up the one area where you're seeing a piece of dirt so like i've got a little piece in here so i'm just going to very carefully lift up that corner and slide the tape underneath until it sticks to that piece of dust and then i can pull it right out all right that looks good enough to me so then i will put the frame i like to put the frame over the top and slide the sandwich in from the back because then i know i'm not introducing anything new into that environment so it's a nice snug fit all right now the next part once this is in there and you can double check make sure that no no dust sometimes dust from the inside of the frame will sneak in there but i think this looks pretty good okay so i've got this in the frame it's mostly dust free i always double check after i put the the whole sandwich together because sometimes dust from the actual framing will get into the sandwich there but it looks it looks pretty good and the next step is to actually attach the artwork into the the frame uh border so for that i'm going to use a tool called a framing point gun this is made by that same company logan that makes most of the framing stuff that i've got and this basically just drives a flat pointed little tab into the side of the frame it's totally invisible from the outside but it will hold this whole sandwich kind of press it towards the front and keep everything nice and secure so there's a couple different varieties of points really there's just two kinds there's um rigid and flexible the flexible ones are good if you ever think you might need to take the the piece out like say you have a diploma or something that you might want to put in a different frame or change out for something else the flexible points will attach into the frame and you can always bend them back and out of the way the rigid points are a little more permanent so i'm going to load some points into the gun which just press that and that opens up the cartridge here there's actually already some points in there if you can see that and then basically this little ridge here you just push that up against the back of the frame and there you go it's satisfying all right so that's the back now the artwork is nice and secure that's not going to go anywhere just making sure that all that dust is still on the outside it looks good and we're ready to attach the final step which is the backing so on the back of the frame you could leave this open but we've gone to all the trouble to make everything nice and archival and sort of sealed from the environment so the last step is to put a dust cover over the back of this and kind of fully close up that whole package so for that i'm just using some brown paper and you want to make sure this is archival as well the frame on top of that and i'm going to use some tape this is um this is just a crafting variety but typically you would use something called atg tape and it comes in a big gun like this advanced tape glider this is what they use in the frame shop and this stuff is also acid-free adhesive i've got the small version here and you basically just apply some glue it's sort of um a thin tape like adhesive that will grab to the backing paper and then just position that on there all right then we can trim off the excess there is another specialized tool for this called a dust cover trimmer that you can get it's basically just a a mount for a straight a straight razor blade that will cut the edge nice and flush along the back so there we go got a nice dust cover that looks super super clean and professional on the back so while we're back here i'll show you how to attach some hanging hardware i will use d-ring hangers which are these little guys here and these just screw into the back of the frame molding and then you can string a wire across the back so i like to measure a few inches from the top of the frame now depending on the size of your frame if you get a really big piece you would want uh you know you'd want a little bit more distance from the top and my frame molding ends like here so i'm going to just drill a pilot hole i've got a little tape flag on there to make sure that i don't go too deep into the frame all right and then some framing wire i really like this coated wire this is really easy on the fingers and the ends don't fray and just give a little bit of a tail there pull that nice and taut all right got our wire on there one thing i like to do for myself for hanging is i'll pull this up to kind of as far as it goes and measure the distance to the top edge of the frame so it looks like i've got about two and a half inches and then i will just rate two and a half at the top that way i know when i go to hang this i can make a mark where the top edge of the frame is and i know that i need my nail hole to go at that distance last thing are some rubber bumpers these little clear adhesive bumpers that go on the back bottom corners and this just protects your wall and also make sure that the frame doesn't shift at all once it's hanging all right so that's looking pretty good there is one thing that i want to fix now as i mentioned before my mitered corners are well they leave something to be desired let's just say white is probably the least forgiving this flat white profile because there's nothing to distract your eye from seeing these big gaps again in a professional frame shop these corners would probably be mostly invisible because you'd have a proper saw and a proper blade but i can totally hide these crimes and make it work with what i have there's another secret that i can show you and this is sort of a it's not that much of a secret in frame shops but it's really useful it's a little sort of a paste wax that comes in a tin it's called nail hole and corner filler and they come in a variety of different colors and finishes and it's basically just a hard wax this never really dries and you can use this in the corners of your frame to kind of blend any of those seams and make them virtually invisible so for this frame i'm going to go with a white finish obviously but there are other colors so there's um different metallics i've got gold and silver here they also have different um wood grain uh colors so they've got like walnut and cherry and you can mix them together so if you've got a frame that's sort of a dark gold like this one for example i've actually mixed black with the gold and i just keep them in these uh to go sort of salad container cups and then anytime i need that that finish i've already got that pre-mixed the reason i save this step for last is because if you apply this wax and any of it gets onto your work surface any of those little waxy pieces you can get it on your glass or even worse you can get it on your artwork so i wait until the frame is fully sealed up everything is closed and then i bring out the wax as the finishing step so i'm going to use a bigger popsicle stick here and you basically just scrape out a little bit and the same way you would apply like a wood filler or epoxy you just sort of wipe it into that crevice and you can already see how well it's disguising that seam all right so all the corners are kind of filled in with wax and i'm just going to go ahead and wipe off all the excess all right there it is so that is a finished picture frame you almost can't tell that my corners were less than perfect that that uh white putty really does some magic and i have to say that's that's the reason i haven't felt compelled to upgrade my saw because i can totally get away with it but here is uh here's a pretty nice looking piece of art it's all nice and finished in the back and i'm very pleased with the finished product i hope that this has given you some ideas for tips for framing stuff at home you can check out links for a lot of these tools in the video description good luck with all your home framing projects and we'll see you next time thank you guys for watching that video if you'd like to further support us at tested you can do so by buying some merch from us in our store a link is below but i wanted to tell you that for the first time we are releasing a discounted bundle of tested merch specifically our original five demerit badges these are ways in which every maker screws up so we've got the measure once cursed twice uh releasing the mysterious blue smoke from electronics and stopping them from working breaking a drill bit uh 3d printer going all flag spaghetti monster on you and my personal most common one cutting your finger yeah get yourself over to testeddashstore.com and line yourself up with some demerit badges i'm going to sew these to my apron oh that actually would make a good one day build\n"