Wednesday 17 October 2012

DIY — Mousepad make-over

So, I've been doing months without a mouse pad. This is visibly not good for my desk, so I decided to finally look for one that fits my needs and pleases my eyes.

As I am a very picky person I rarely find something that keeps me pleased for a long time or even at all. I almost always have to tweak things to get them to my liking. So, that counts for a mouse pad as well.















Mouse pads essentially have a sort of soft anti-slip subsurface so you could make a mouse pad out of anything that has that. I didn't have anything similar lying around so I just used an old mouse pad. It's a lot easier because you won't have a lot of work with it. Here's what I did.

Materials:
- Old mousepad
- X-acto knife
- Spray paint (colour of your choice)
- Newspaper
- Strong tape or contact paper


What to do:

1. Take the old mouse pad and start scratching off the surface you normally use to put the mouse on. This will now become the bottom side and vice versa. This is kind of a tricky part because the material is hard to tear off. I found it worked best to make a few scratches first and then peel it all off, starting in the middle, piece by piece. Be careful for your nails and fingers because both the plastic and the knife are sharp of course. At the end it's important the plastic is off, as you can see it's not a beautiful surface but that doesn't matter since it's never gonna be visible. Without the plastic, this side can now be used as the anti-slip side.

2. When all of the plastic is gone, turn to the bottom side again. You will now want to tape off one half of the surface (which is a triangle) and spray paint the other half (the other triangle). It's very important to really have a strong tape covering the part that doesn't need paint, because bad tape will lift off and will make a mess. I chose a silver metallic tone. You can spray both sides if you like, but to keep it clean I only did one. Take it all outside and start spraying! Don't forget to use the newspaper to keep the paint from covering the floor of course.

3. Tadaa! Let it dry for a while.


1 comment:

Marlene Detierro said...

What a fun way to spice up such a plain and not so fun household object! This is so great!

Marlene Detierro (Seattle IT Consulting)