As I had wished for a very long time, I finally got a mount board home and ready to go with my DIY framing for my favourite four paintings. I call it “Four Seasons”. They were painted by Xiao Xue, a young but talented artist who lived in Zhou Zhuang, Suzhou, China. My husband bought these paintings on his visit many year ago. I love them very much, but we never had a chance to properly display these gorgeous work in our home.

There have been a number of reasons for this. First, we have never really settled in the past 10 years. We had been here and there, and a tasteful art work display has never been a high priority in our life. Second, the professional framing is very costly in this country, I don’t want to open that door before I have a clear idea about what I want to do. Third, we have been renting and I am not sure about our chance to survive in ruining the surface of the wall by putting some nails in, or a possible glassed frame falling down and getting broken with using 3M adhesive hooks to hold the paintings up, which would be very ugly and probably the last thing I want to see.

But now, none of them is any more important. My husband and I finally reached an agreement the other day. We decided to do it, though nothing mentioned above had ever changed. We just want to get the framing done first and then think of the next step.So, me holding a box cutter knife, a 30cm long plastic ruler and a pencil, sitting here and tried to do a perfect job to make the world look prettier. The mounting board I bought is about 1.75mm thick and big enough to do all 4 paintings, but I have never thought it could be this hard to cut the board through.

For every edge, I have to repeat at least 6-7 times to cut one edge up. And especially if it is a long edge, I just felt that my hand wasn’t big enough to control the ruler to give it the right pressure. I was so exhausted after only having had finished four edges. Then when I got to cutting the inner edges, it became a total disaster. The corner is extremely hard to deal with. It easily becomes very untidy on edges or simply just torn off. I realised that I can only do a straight cut on edges with a simple Stanley knife, instead of the professional framing, which creates a 45 degrees angel for this thickness of the mount board. It looks totally different.

I can’t remember how I muddled through. I just did my best and now I completely was convinced why people keep saying that it’s better to go to a professional framing service to get it done.

Anyway I got them all done, don’t know where to hang them now but I will find a home for them. I am not saying that I didn’t enjoy DIY framing, it’s just too hard to do it right. I am thinking if I will ever have to do it again (and it’s highly possible as we have too many photos and paintings we can display), at least I need to get my tools right or get some cutter like this one. Believe it or not, My plastic ruler almost split off