Kinusaiga Basics - Foam Board, Styrofoam & Frames Explained

Hello there and welcome to my arts and crafts room. I'm Crafty Patty. On my last video, I showed you how to make this Kinosega peony fabric card. If you have not watched this video, I will leave the link to this video in the description box below, as well as the full supply list and any links to any products I use in the video. I've had such a great response on this video. I really wanted to help you out and get you started to make this art form. I myself was very confused by foam boards. What they were called, were they called styrofoam? What's XPS? It was all very confusing to me. So I want to take the frustration and headaches away so you can get started in this beautiful art form and be successful. I will also go over how to buy the right foam to fit your frames and we'll go over that as well. So let's get started by talking about the foam board first and then we'll go into the framing. Foam board, as you can see, comes in many different sizes, types, names. This particular one I did on my last video, I did with this XPS 2-inch and it came in this size and I got that from Amazon. And the reason I got this one is because I was going to do the fabric to frame the sides. Here's a 1-inch styrofoam. This insulation, it's from DuPont, so they do call their brand styrofoam, which is confusing. This is seam 20 insulation, but if you look on the small print here, it is XPS. Although this one says it's styrofoam, it's not styrofoam that we're worried about. But you can also look for the other word, if you're ordering online or wherever, you can look for the words polystyrene. And you can see that by looking at the side. So if you're going to your lumber yard to get this, you can have a look at your side and you know. You can also press into it and you can see how firm that is. It's not styrofoam, although it is a type of styrofoam. That's why it's confusing. And that's why I particularly wanted to do this video because it confused me. They say styrofoam, but when I think of styrofoam, I think of this bumpy stuff like this, which does not work for Kinesaga because it's just too rough and doesn't make clean cuts. This particular sheet, again, before I cut it up to get it in my car, again, was two feet by eight feet, and this is about $20. But because the sheet was damaged, they kind of gave it to me for free. You just gotta ask. And here's another one. This one happens to be half an inch. Again, if you look on your side, you can see it's the high density foam. And this particular one does say XPS insulation. When I bought this at Home Depot, I asked them to cut it in three so I could fit it in my car. But when it was in one whole piece, it measured two feet by eight feet, and this one cost me about $17. So you can see you get a lot of boards for your Kinesaga artwork out of that. Now the reason I'm showing you this, which is foam board, which I got from the dollar store, is that it's only about a quarter inch thick. This is what's going to be used if you want to make any alterations to the height in your frame. Another way to make alterations is by using foam tape. This is double-sided foam tape, but as you can see, it's only about an eighth of an inch thick. So that will help to bring it up to the right height if needed. Now in the last video, I did show cutting the foam board with an X-Acto knife, but it doesn't go deep enough for a real clean cut. So now I've got a better way for you. You want to pick up a utility knife like this. This is actually the cheapest one you can actually buy. It's like $1.99. The reason I'm saying to get this one is because it has a really thin blade and that's why it works great. And you can extend it to the depth of your foam board. So I've marked out just under eight and a half inches so it will fit in one of my frame boards. And I'm just going to draw the line just so I have it as a reference. Now because I'm going to be coming in with the sharper blade against a metal ruler, just in case it slips, I don't want anybody hurting themselves. So I'm going to put on one of these no-cut gloves for safety and that should protect me in case I slip. And I've extended the blade and I'm going to come down as deep as I can. And you might not get all the way through on the first cut. That's okay. We're going to make a second cut. Come back in to the beginning, draw through again. I'll leave the blade in, move my board up, move my ruler down, and we'll finish off the end of it. Now that I've got my main cut, I'm just going to come in and come all the way through. You can probably feel there's some resistance. Come in and come through again. Now you can at this point just pick it up and put it against the edge of the table and break it, but I've found that this gives a cleaner cut. And I'm through now. And that's a pretty decent cut. There's a little bit of pull and drag right here where I might have come in with my knife a little bit, but that's pretty good. I'm happy with that. And that's how you cut your board. And if you want to make any fine adjustments when you're fitting them into your frames, then I use my cutting mat to line up my top and my bottom so it's exactly square. And then when I place my ruler on, I look from above and I can see where my line is on my cutting mat, on the top, and I can see if it is on the bottom. And I know I'm going to slice right through and it'll be squared up. Now we've made a cleaner cut and then you can do the same for any other sides to make them fit. Now let's talk about framing options. There's lots of choices. This one here is actual wood and what you call this is a wood cradle. So on the back side is normally where an artist will do their artwork and then it's already a nice framed piece. My sister was having fun with some liquid painting here. That's what this is. So it got rejected. So on the other side, we're going to use this for our frame. So let's say we wanted to use this and you wanted to have it level with your sides. So as you can see, this is a one inch board I've cut and when you pop it in, it sinks down a fair bit. So that extra little foam board I picked up from the dollar store is working beautifully. So I've cut two of those and pop those in there and then pop this in and you're perfectly level with your frame. Now when you cut your pieces, you always want to leave a little bit of extra on the sides. Don't cut it so it's really really tight because you want a little bit of room for your fabric to come over your edges. So there's that option. Let's go for option number two. Here's another type of cradle board, even though they call this an artist panel, where you would normally paint on the outside but on the back side you've got something you can use for a frame. So this one, even though I measure it, it comes up to saying it's just under, you probably can't see that, just under an inch. So if I go to put my one inch foam board in there, it will sit slightly higher than the frame. Now you might want that. That might be a nice effect. You don't always have to have it totally level. You can have it raised as well. But if you don't want it that way, then, like I've showed you, with that wonderful cheap foam board I picked up from a dollar store is really coming in handy. Pop that in with your half inch and you've got it now recessed a little bit down. So depending on what you like is what you can do. These frames can be painted any color you want. I'm not going to paint them yet because I want to see what design I do and then I will decide the color I want for the frame. Now to have this stick in here, of course, you can glue that down to the back, put some more glue on, and then when you finished your project, then you would glue that in. I wouldn't glue it right away, of course, because you want to work on it. So that's option number two. Option number three. I found these at Dollarama for some decor art. I thought, oh, I could do something with that. And now that I'm really loving the Kinosega, I'm going to use this for Kinosega. So again, I've measured in to see what the depth is here and I'm looking at, I've got about three quarters of an inch. So I'm putting in my little board again from the dollar store and then I pop in my half inch and there we go. And another option for you, I got these from Michaels. They were on for 60% off for a set of three. So it worked out really cheap for being $5 for each one. This is called the display frame, or you might also hear it being called a shadow box frame. So these ones are nice and easy. You just flip up all the tabs like so. And once they're all flipped up, you can take apart. I've already taken the glass out of this one and there's a little extra frame in here. So that comes out. And then how I measure this one is I take my backing piece with the hanger. I put that back in and then I know how much I've got left to put in here to get into those little tabs. So from the backing up to my tab, I've got, I would say, almost three quarters of an inch. So that tells me that, let's take this out, I was to put in a piece of my half inch, a piece of that home board from the dollar store, and then I've got my backing board. And look at that. That fits in perfectly and I can put the tabs back in and it would be ready for framing. And this is where you would have your Kinoshita art. And I would say this is my favorite for many reasons. For one, the back of the piece is very professional, just like a regular frame. And this allows to take away any imperfections like you would see on this type of a frame, but they all work. This of course comes in many different sizes. It doesn't have to be an eight by eight. And if you wait for sale, then you can get them on for sale or maybe on Amazon. So there you go. I'm all ready to now do my Kinosaga artwork. Okay, so my suggestion to you is if you're going to frame your Kinosaga artwork, then do buy your frame first and then you can measure the depth of your frame and have it so your piece of foam board fits beautifully inside your frame like I showed you in this video. I'm really loving this art form and I want to make lots more. So I plan on doing a set of three with these three frames here and I think because I'm such a beachy girl, I'm going to do some beachy kind of things like maybe seahorses or starfish or something like that. So turn on your notification bell so you don't miss the next video. Until next time, bye-bye.