Something of a learning experience

[eve_prime]

D. made a computer artwork to enter in the county fair, which I’d printed on the nice laser printer at my office, and today I set forth to try to make a matte frame for it. I bought a black matte with a black core, a cutter, a straight edge, and a can of adhesive spray at the campus art supply store, and I followed some instructions I found online. Neither my first try nor my backup square worked, so I ended up having to go back to my office to cut a couple more squares. Finally, with the final one, I got it right, or close enough.

Stuff I learned for next time.

After measuring the size of opening you need, make the frame a few millimeters smaller, because it’s hard to be precise when you're cutting it. Or in this case, I had to go back to my office and print the picture again with more background.

It’s okay to overshoot the corners by a millimeter or two, both at the beginning and end of the cut, in order to get the nice bevelled look. Otherwise you risk having the corners all vague and smooshy (bad).

Have the backing ready to affix before you spray the adhesive. I was going to do it in a two-step process, but once it was lying there all sticky, I found myself running around trying to find something to put on it to seal it up.

Most important – if I do this again I should definitely try to rig up some kind of clamp to hold the straight edge in place! It was really hard to press down hard enough on both the straight edge and the cutter, while moving the cutter. In fact, it’s over five hours later, and part of my left hand is still numb.

So with luck, my hand will recover in a few days. It really was harder than I expected!