Measuring for the aperture: Your aperture needs to be a little smaller than the image you want to mount so that you can position the picture behind the mount (and so it doesn’t fall through!). We’d suggest allowing at least 2.5mm on each side.
For example, if you want to frame an A4 image (297mm x 210mm) you should make the aperture 292mm x 205mm).
Your picture may have a white or coloured border, some of which you may want to see within the mount aperture.
Again, you simply need to measure carefully and tell us the exact aperture you require.
We will cut it precisely to the sizes you give us.
Mount border size: The size of the mount border you enter will set the width from the aperture to the outer edge of the mount.
So adding borders of 100mm on all sides will make the overall mount size 200mm wider and 200mm taller than the aperture size you gave us.
Note: Each frame has a small lip that will overlap the edge of the mount (and keep it in place). The lip size varies depending on the frame, but is normally about 5mm, so approximately 5mm of your mount will be hidden under the frame lip on all sides. You may want to allow for this.
A framer’s hint: Many cheap mounts simply have the same size border on the top, bottom and sides, but a professional framer will normally create a slightly deeper bottom border. This prevents the optical illusion of the picture appearing to sit too low in the frame. The slightly deeper bottom border gives more ‘balance’ to the overall piece. Not everyone agrees, but you might want to check it out for yourself. As a guide, making the bottom border 10% greater than the top border is about right.
Double & triple mount widths: The most important thing to note is that adding extra mount layers does not increase the width of the overall mount borders.
The width from the aperture to the outer edge of all mounts is set by the border sizes that you entered in the ‘Sizes’ section of the Frame Designer, irrespective of how many mount layers you choose.
Entering the ‘Offset’: If you choose to add a double or triple mount, you just need to tell us the ‘offset’ between each layer.
The offset dimension you enter will be the amount of mountboard showing beneath the upper layer. For instance, if you have a blue top mount and a pale grey second mount, and you set the offset of 7mm, you will see 7mm of pale grey mount showing beneath your blue top mountboard.
Remember, changing the offset does not change the overall width of your mount borders. It just sets how much of the lower mount is shown.