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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;mirana, post: 9546314, member: 79705&quot;]Former professional framer here, who still occasionally does it for my current career, and am married to a frame shop manager.</p><p><br /></p><p>Custom archival framing has never been cheap in my life time. You can cut costs in some areas of course, but it is always going to be costly to have a whole piece done, to buy molding, or the archival items like acid-free mats or UV protection glass. In the 90s, in a corporate shop that gets discounts, it was still hundreds to frame anything. Even a tiny piece with sale prices was going to be minimum $80...in 1990s dollars!</p><p><br /></p><p>Consider the framing of a piece you love to be like buying a piece of furniture. It is something that you will look at every day and enjoy, that you want to keep from fading or acid burning. If you want that to be in an &quot;it&#039;ll do&quot; color frame, where the margins are funky, or maybe it fades from sunlight or browns from acid, that&#039;s the choice you&#039;ve gotta make lol.</p><p><br /></p><p>Keep in mind the costs of the materials are expensive to start. I get everything at cost and it&#039;s still only what I do when I really love a piece. Wood prices going up didn&#039;t help.</p><p><br /></p><p>$20 for an 18x24&quot; mat is quite cheap. Maybe next time you can ask for the mat drop out (since you&#039;re paying for the whole piece that the larger board is cut from) and if you get a smaller art piece, just pay for them to cut from what you&#039;ve got. $14 for archival foamboard is pretty standard too. It&#039;s a bit more expensive than the regular foamboard because the paper on the sandwich is different.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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