How to properly frame your finished diamond painting kit to show off your masterpiece or present it beautifully as a gift.

Make Sure Your Diamonds are Bonded Properly

First, you are going to want to roll your painting. Not roll it up - literally roll it, as in with an actual rolling pin. To protect your newly affixed gems, you should cover your sparkly canvas with the plastic sheet it came with in your diamond painting kit. If you happened to throw that sheet away, no worries. A piece of parchment paper or regular old printer paper will work just as well. The one type of paper you will want to avoid is wax paper, as that can get stuck to the diamonds as a result of the pressure applied during the rolling process. Once you have spread out the plastic sheet or some other form of covering to protect your canvas, take a rolling pin and thoroughly roll over every part of the canvas that contains gems. If you do not have a rolling pin, a can or a mason jar can also work, although you may need to apply more pressure and it will likely take longer. The rolling process will bond the diamonds immovably to the canvas and ensure they do not fall off during the framing process.

You may be thinking that rolling your canvas sounds like more than enough to ensure your diamonds are properly bonded to the canvas, but you can never be too careful when it comes to loose diamonds. Expert diamond painters will tell you that you also need to do the book trick. This involves finding several heavy books and stacking them on top of your painting canvas (which should still be covered with the plastic sheet or the paper!). You will then leave the stack of books on top of the canvas overnight. This duration of time should absolutely, positively guarantee that your diamonds are forever stuck to the canvas and they will not fall off and roll across the floor while you are attempting to hang your painting on the wall.

Frame Your Painting Properly

With most paintings or pictures, it is pretty simple to frame them - you just remove the back of the frame, slip the picture or painting in, make sure it's straight, reattach the back of the frame, and hang the framed picture or painting on the wall. Framing diamond paintings are a little bit more complicated, but well worth the effort in the end when you are able to stand back and admire your sparkly masterpiece. First, you do not want any glass in your frame. Most frames will come with a sheet of glass to protect your picture from exposure; however, for diamond paintings, this glass will only detract from your painting's natural ability to sparkle. What this situation means is that, once you have framed your painting and hung it on the wall, you will likely need to gently clean the painting itself as it accumulates dust over time, as opposed to simply wiping down the glass for a normally framed painting.

So, you have your frame, and you have removed the glass component and set it aside for another purpose. Take your diamond painting canvas and gently insert it into the frame. It is likely that the canvas will likely be a little larger than the frame itself, as larger canvases give diamond painters more leverage to work with. Simply take the excess edges of the canvas and fold them down over the back of the canvas so that they are not visible from the front. Replace the frame's backing, and you are ready to hang your finished masterpiece on the wall!

As mentioned above, your diamond painting will probably require a little extra maintenance to keep it looking beautiful than a regular painting would require. But, on the flip side, if any of your diamonds do become gradually unstuck over time and end up falling out, it will also be much simpler to re-stick them to the painting without a layer of glass in the way. You likely will not even have to remove your painting from the wall to re-stick your gems - you could just pick them right off the floor and stick them back on!