DIY: Home is Where You Park It Doormat

I fell in love with a similar doormat design from an Etsy shop, but the shop owner was on vacation according to her site. I waited over a month for her to begin accepting orders again. I eventually said, "Forget it" and began Pinning do-it-yourself doormat ideas. We even conducted a poll across our social media accounts to narrow down our design. There's two ways to go about making one of these puppies, either with or with a Cricut. I'll explain both since not everyone has a Cricut.

'The Peru Family' design won across the board over 'Tiny Home Toy Hauler'

For non-Cricut owners, you will need a printer, card stock, Word/Pages, and an exact-o knife. Using your preferred software, pick your font and size. You may need more than one page of paper since you will be most likely be printing the larger words individually. Once everything is printed out on the card stock, use the exact-o knife to cut out the printed letters. Then utilize some painters tape to tape the stencil to the mat for placement.

For Cricut owners, you can either use the Cricut provided program, Canva, or Photoshop. As a photographer, I am pretty well versed with Photoshop so it is my 'go to'. I make my image to the size of the doormat and then split it to fit the 12x12 Cricut mat since I haven't invested in the 12x24 mat. Import whatever file into the Cricut program and be sure to save it as a 'Cut' image. Use card stock and create your stencil. Tape it on with painters tape.

For all: I wasn't sure which method of application I was going to prefer so I had both a sponge and a small paint brush. They're nothing fancy since all materials are from Walmart(except the doormat which is from Ikea). I ended up liking the paint brush for the stencil and the sponge to darken things up once the stencil was off. For paint I used black Tulip fabric paint. That is the secret to preventing the lettering from bleeding. Plus its much more durable. Once I dabbed the whole stencil, I removed it and went back to fine tune the letters with extra fabric paint either with the sponge or straight from the fine tipped bottle.

This can also be a fun and easy DIY for toddlers to help or do themselves. So feel free to welcome those little creative minions.

If you have any questions or happen to give this a try let me know what you think in the comments. I also welcome improvements and suggestions as well!