How to Frame Pressed Flowers - Glass on Glass Framing Mini Course

So today I'm going to show you how to frame up a 18 by 24 glass on glass piece. Right here we have a picture frame that will fit in 18 by 24 art size. We get all of our frames from a company called Picture Woods. It's a local company up in Boulder, Colorado and they're absolutely gorgeous handcrafted frames. Glass on glass pieces are a bit heavier. There are a couple things that you do need to take into consideration when you're doing glass on glass pieces. Glass on glass adds double the weight. Our 18 by 24 pieces weigh about 10 pounds at the end of the day. The most important thing is your miters. If you're building your own frames, you're getting frames from somewhere, there's multiple ways to secure your miters. They use dovetails, which is kind of like a little plug that gets pushed in to the back side of the miter. It goes all the way to the face of the frame and so it's covering a lot of surface area and then you also have wood glue that's sealing it. It's a very strong way of securing a miter. Most frame shops or any frames that you usually see, they use a v-nail which is another way of securing a miter. It's not as good but it's pretty darn good. Dovetails is one of the most secure so that's why another reason why we like using this company. Everything has to be pretty precise with framing. You have to have your measurements pretty dialed. Framing in itself is a completely different business. This is called the face of your frame and I always like a rather thinner profile. These are three quarter inch faces. That's kind of what I use for everything but I do want to touch base on your rabbet. Your rabbet is what allows the glass to go inside of the frame. There's different profiles for frames all throughout. The rabbet depth on this is also three quarters inch. This piece, this piece right here from the edge to the back is three quarters. If you're doing larger pieces, you might want to consider doing a larger profile meaning like your rabbet depth is larger because that'll ensure you have actually a stronger frame. So our 24 by 30 glass and glass pieces, I use a larger profile frame that has a larger rabbet depth because it ensures that your miters, they're actually stronger when you have a larger profile. Another thing that I do, it's not totally necessary on your 18 by 24s but definitely on 24 by 30s. These are very strong frames but I kind of overbuild everything and so I use these flat corner braces. Basically a corner brace that you will install on each of your back corners giving it more support, more structure, not going anywhere. Before I put those on, you'll want to actually put your hangers on. So we use sawtooth hangers. The weight capacity is 20 pounds on these guys. I like to use screws. There are sawtooth hangers that you can put nails in but they're not as strong. These are perfect for my application because they fit literally perfectly on the back. There's no overhang. So as you can see, like when these are installed, there's no overhang on the bottom or the top. It's completely flush. So that was really important to me because I don't want the customer to see any of this hanger while it's actually hung on the wall. We will get into actually framing the piece now. You'll want to install your hangers before you install your braces if you do use braces and I'll show you why. This will be the top and this is my bottom and I just use the brace as a template of where I'm going to put my sawtooth hangers. I'll first put my sawtooth hangers on before I actually put the corner brace on and to do that I just basically throw down the corner brace as a template guide and I'll hold my sawtooth hanger basically as flush as I can get it. I'm basically just going to mark a little dot with a pencil. It doesn't have to be perfect and I'll show you why. This took me a while to figure out because I was not getting accurate holes and so sometimes I would have an overhang because my holes wouldn't be perfectly centered. So this is something that you could definitely definitely do. This is just a small piece of aluminum bracket. It's just a it comes in like a length of like two feet or three feet or whatever and this took a while and you'd have to you'd have to spend some time on it but this is the way I do it to have precise measurements. Again like framing is all about precision. All these holes the ones that don't have this arrow are not good holes and they all look fairly even but these three holes right here match up perfectly to where I will need to drill and this is where my screws are going to go. So everything is precise. I'm going to use one of these guys and I did a whole bunch because you know it takes a while to figure out how to get the best hole and it's basically a template guide and it's literally to make precise holes for your sawtooth hangers. So after I got my little pencil marks I line it up with one of the holes and this is why it doesn't have to be fully perfect because I just need to see where the pencil mark is and I'll go along and drill the two holes. For a drill bit all you're using is a drill bit that is a little smaller than your actual screw. Shouldn't be bigger but just a little smaller than your actual screw. I just tape off where I want to stop drilling at and that's why I have the blue tape there. So after you have those drilled out then you can install your sawtooth hanger. It's one so as you can see you can't see like when it's hanging on the wall you won't see any of this hanger. It's just absolutely flush. Everything's even because I have this template guide. You can make different templates. This literally allows you to have precise holes for your sawtooth hanger and you won't incur a lot of headaches if you're framing a lot. This if you're framing a lot. If you're just doing this like one or two times you probably don't need that and you can eyeball it and you can take your time and make sure it's correct but we do a ton of frames so for efficiencies and preciseness I do that. So I'll do the other side now and then we'll get into the corner braces and then we will frame up the piece. So this is just all preparation work. All right so sawtooth are in. Now we will install our corner braces and for this I'm going to use a different drill bit because the screws for the corner braces are a little different than the ones that I just used. So basically I have a little different bit for the screws and then a little different bit for the actual hole size. Rule of thumb is your bits just for drilling just need to be a little bit smaller than your actual screw. Make sure it's just lined up nice and neat along the corner. I'll do a pencil mark on these two outer ones and then I will take a awl and I will gently make a small indentation where I will drill. So I have my two hole marks now. Those are the two outer holes of the corner brace. I don't usually do this sitting down. I never do. You'll want to actually be standing up when you're doing this because you want to be drilling straight down. You want to make sure your drill doesn't like go out of the frame. This part, the corner braces isn't fully necessary at all. Like I don't think anyone does this. I just really like to overdo everything. So once you have your your two holes then you can literally start drilling in your two outer brace holes. So once you have that you can either mark your holes again or you can eyeball it with your drill. Perfect. Then you have your other two holes. Super simple and you drill your screws in. You have your two sawtooth hangers ready to go and then you have your corner brace as well and now I'm just going to go around do the other corner braces and then we will move to the next steps. Frame is prepped. So for this we always use UV glass. Get it from a distributor of it because they don't sell direct to retailers but you could get it at Michaels. You can get it at other frame molding companies. Most carry them. Frame shops will carry this. Cleaning glass. I use this this brand Brillianize for acrylic or uh or glass and it works quite nicely but there's a lot of different glass cleaners out there. I'll also put these rags in there because I was having a really hard time using microfiber rags because they kept leaving dust everywhere on the glass and I love them. They don't leave any dust particles from the actual rag itself. Even microfiber rags say they're 100% whatever they are. They still they still leave dust on the glass. Always make sure to use a glove that has thicker coating on it so you don't slice your fingers and then I'll hold the other piece of glass on this side and I'll usually look at it under some sort of light to make sure there's no smudges from my fingers and there's no hairs from my beard on it or anything else that you don't want in your frame. So the way I do these again it's your own personal preference just find out what works for you but I like to hold up the frame and then I just put it in there and then I'll let it drop in and you're all set. And then I will do one last clean off of the glass. I'll give it a little shake so in case I am picking up any dust I just shake it off away from the frame and that looks great. Okay so before I install the art piece a couple things I want to mention. Before I actually put the piece of art in Rachel is kindly enough to hold this up but if you have flowers that are like super thick you might need internal spacers. You want your glass to be flush and so if you have really thick flowers you might have like some teeter-tottering going on. I don't like that at all I just want the glass to be super flat. So you would install internal spacers against this and so it would be glass, internal spacer, then the art piece, and then you'd have an external spacer at the end. Internal spacers would keep like the artwork off of the front piece of glass as well but it's mainly to give me the ability to have a really flush piece of glass because the art glass would sit flush against the internal spacers and the whole teeter-totter would not exist anymore. I don't have the problem of that with this one so I'm not going to install internal spacers. Also this frame profile is not deep enough to do internal spacers and external spacers. My internal spacers when I do use them are always 3 16th inch by a quarter inch and then my external spacers which holds everything in on the back side are always a half an inch. I always use a larger external spacer because when you're shooting your nails in, which I'll show you, I want enough space so the nail doesn't accidentally go through here and then actually hit the glass. That happened to me one time and that's all it took for me to upgrade to larger spacers. That's important for me so might be important for you too. Unless you're like a master at using the nail gun, I do like using these and they're thicker. They're sturdier than the quarter inch. They're way more secure. So we're about to put the art inside of the frame. Before you do that you will have to clean any smudges, finger smudges that you have on here, glue run-offs. It is by far the least favorite part of this whole process. I do not like this process. It's so easy to clip your rag on something like hanging down and it could rip off a petal or flower or stem or anything like that. It's just difficult. Like you have to be so careful with doing it. I already cleaned everything off downstairs. I just want to let you know you will have to spend some time cleaning things off before you put this into frame. We're just gonna tip this one a little bit and then I grab the top of this. I try not to even hold the glass up here even though this rubber on the glove isn't going to leave a finger mark. But I still just kind of like to grab it with my inside between my two fingers and lift a little bit so you don't have a big lift to go to and drop in and I'll put it down. And then I'll give it a really light wipe on the outside. You'll find when you use these gloves you can easily wash them with a little like Dawn dish soap and if you do have finger marks on there and oil and stuff like that you'll want to definitely wash it off. I do it probably every two weeks. I'll wash my gloves. You also want to wash your rags as well. It's just important to make sure not like don't use these gloves for anything else. They're your framing gloves and that is it. So now we will put our spacers in and I'll show you that. For actually installing the external spacers this is what is literally holding your two pieces of glass in. So you want things to be pretty darn secure. I use a 23 gauge pin mailer. I tried using a compressor one. This one you don't have to oil anything. The compressor one I was having to oil and it was like shooting oil out on the glass and it was absolutely horrible and it drove me insane. I use half inch 23 gauge pins like the pin nails. That's like a perfect amount to go through my spacer and then also go about halfway into the frame. That is very important to get the right size nail because you don't want the nail going through your frame on the other side because then you literally have to bind your frame and start over or you could putty it then you're gonna have to sand it and stain it again and all of this has been through trial and error. I've made every single mistake that I'm saying for you not to do. Like I have made them all and it's not fun correcting these mistakes. The last thing I will tell you starting off like this is how I will nail in the nails and you'll see you have some metal up here and if you're putting this directly on the glass like that and you shoot that nail in there you're probably going to scratch the glass or do something with the glass that you weren't wanting to do. So preventative measures are great. This is just a piece of chipboard really thin. You could probably use even just a piece of paper. If you are resting something on the glass definitely put something underneath your your pin nailer and then you can you know shoot your nails in there. I'm not going to use it because I don't need to anymore but I wish I had known that when I was starting this all because I definitely, I definitely ruined some glass like that. Make sure your battery's charged because you want full strength of your nails going into the wood. These are hardwoods and that's why I pre-drill everything because you don't want to split the wood and for this super easy. I already cut down the spacers. I just do it on a little bit of an angle and you go through and go all the way down. I usually do about three nails and then one in the middle. There you go. The way you want to actually put in your spacers you'll do the top and bottom first and then your perpendicular ones you want to do those last. If you're doing landscape do your top and bottom spacers first. If you're doing portrait do your top and bottom spacers first. It's just a rule of thumb. It gives it more support. It's a framing rule. It's important. All right so there you go. There's the 18 by 24 all framed up. All the spacers are in. Everything's in. That concludes the glass on glass framing tutorial. Hopefully you'll take away tidbits of this. Modify it as you will. If you have questions just put them on the YouTube comments and I will get back to you. So thank you.