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Stretched Canvas or Art Panel Installed Into Floater Frame


In this video, I'm going to show you how to hold a stretched canvas or a panel into a floater frame.

Floater frames don't cover any of your canvas or panel. What we have here, first off, is a canvas that's on a stretcher bar. The height of this really doesn't make that much difference. You would've already ordered it in such a way so the floater frame makes sense with your depth.

Under most circumstances, when you put the canvas inside of the frame, you're going to have some distance around the outside, and you want that to be equal. You can take the box that we sent, the frame in, and cut it up into some little pieces to give yourself some spacers. Sometimes you may find that you need a little bit different thickness of a material than just the cardboard. If that's the case, you can cut up a cereal box or anything else that you might have in your recycle and whittle it down into the smallest, the smallest dimensions of materials that you want to take to get this size completely the same all the way around, that's to your liking and how picky of a person you are.

Get all the spacers in to where I'm even. Then I'm going to tip them all down. They should have enough resistance to where they don't want to really come out after I tip the frame over so I can work on it.

Now, the other thing that you can do, if you want to take the time to do it, is you could take some of that packing material and you could figure out whatever this distance is from the top of the frame to where it touches the actual canvas itself, and you could cut yourself some cardboard strips that were the same dimension as this. It looks like it's about a half inch from the top of the frame to where the canvas meets, and you could lay those on the table in there to where then when you turn this thing over, there's some resistance on the canvas itself. Be sure to get it out over the edge of the bar, if you do that, if you want to go that extra mile to have that resistance. I do it when I start to put these screws in, I have that in there snug, and I just reach around and I push, making sure I push on the frame, the stretcher frame part, just enough to where it holds in there, and I'm not going to push it down.

We have drilled the floater frame with holes. On a small piece like this I only have four holes. We've given you screws. Now these screws we've given you are five-eighths of an inch. The holes e drilled will countersink for you, but you want to make sure you have enough meat in your stretcher bar that the screw does not go out the front of the canvas. Not a good idea.

Anyway, drop the screw in the hole, and then reach around and apply just a little bit of pressure, and put this screw in. I can feel it as it just starts to suck up. I'm not going to pull up really, really hard. I'm going to move it around, and I'm going to do all four corners to where I feel I'm not putting a ton of pressure on the stretcher. Now I'm going to put in all the remaining screws.

Now I'm going to kind of go around, and snug everything up a little bit. And voila, your stretched canvas is completely held in the frame. Flip it back around. Get something sharp but within reason and be careful not to scar your canvas or your frame, and get those cardboard pieces out. I used a knife. Honestly, I probably wouldn't do that under most circumstances. I just happened to have it laying there. I might get something like a screwdriver. Totally ready to go. Hang it up, put the hardware kit on the back if you ordered it so you can hang it on the wall.

Now I'm going to show you how to do a canvas panel. We may or may not have even drilled holes in this because if you told us that you were doing a quarter inch panel, we won't drill holes in the frame because we know you're going your panel in without screws. If that's the case, we may have given you some sticky tape. It's sticky on both sides. You put it inside of the frame in different areas. I'm only going to do two, just to show you this on this tutorial, but you could put multiples depending on if you had a great big frame, you could put it in little pieces and put it all around.

Then you're going to carefully set it down where you want it in there. I would maybe, sometimes if I had a really large piece someone to help you. Eyeball a quarter of an inch and set it down. I might even take a couple of spacers like I had done before, if I had them in there, and maybe put that in there, kind of bump them up against here, and have somebody help you if you had a really large piece. But I can kind of do that myself there, and on the side here, and get that down.

Then I'm just going to push down on this one side, and then when I drop it, I'm right there. I got basically an even amount all the way around. I haven't put any pressure yet, in case I have to move it or fine tune it, and I can kind of just try to work it around the best I can. When I get it, push it down, and there it is. Stuck in. It can easily come back out if you needed to. This is pretty aggressive but not ultra aggressive, so if it ever moved in the future, you could always apply more if it got old or something. You're going to be able to hold that artwork in there really nicely.

The other way to do it if it's your art is you could actually glue it in. I would do glue dots. Dot of glue, dot of glue, dot of glue, dot of glue, À la carte, all the way around. Never squirt use glue in lines. Glue dots will pop off much, much easier for you in the future than a line of glue will if you ever need to get the art out of the floater frame itself.

That's the safest way to go with the panel, but sometimes as an artist you may not want to do that because you figure somebody's going to buy this art or maybe want to reframe it. But if it's going to hang on your wall and you love that frame, glue dots might be just a little bit safer than just even using a tape.

So, that being said, that's two ways, two of the best ways we've come to holding in your stretched canvas or your panel into a floater frame.