Dollhouse Door Mats

Watch the video here.

This week's project is only one of I am sure many ways to make a door mat for your dollhouse. I love to put a seasonal doormat on the front porch of my dollhouses because it makes them look so much more lived in. They are incredibly easy to make and really your only limitation is your own imagination.

For the design you can do like I did in the video and use rubber stamps or you could stencil yours, or paint it, or decoupage it, or whatever you want to try. It would be very easy to make a bunch so you could change them out every month to keep your dollhouse decorated at all times for whatever time of year it is.

Like normal I made mine in 1/12^th scale however this project can be sized up or down to whatever scale you want. The exact technique would work for 1/6^th scale (Barbie) just cut the mat bigger.

Any smaller than 1/12^th and I think I would use some black card-stock and just coat the top side with some white paint. Go easy with the paint so it doesn't soak through, you'll have to experiment a bit to see what works. For bigger (like 1/3^rd scale- American Girl dolls) I think I would use some of the thick sheets of black craft foam and again just paint the top side with some white paint followed by whatever color you want.

I think the bigger scales would be easier to find stamps and stencils for too. I had a hard time finding what I wanted to use. I looked at all the local craft stores for a small stamp that either said Welcome or Welcome Home but there were none. I am going to have to keep my eyes open for that for future use.

You might be asking why I didn't just use black felt to begin with instead of coating a colored felt with the black gesso and then the white gesso. The reason is that I wanted to be able to see that the gesso had soaked all the way through the felt. If you do this you will see (and feel) the difference in the feel of the felt after all that gesso dries. It really does feel a lot more like the rubber mats it is supposed to be copying.

If you can't come up with an idea of what to put on your mat I suggest you search for pictures of door mats on the internet. You will find many more ideas than you can probably every use.

Door mats come in many sizes, I made this project 1 ½ “ by 2 ½” to represent a mat that is about 18” by 30”. That is the size of the one by my front door so that is what I went with. You can make yours any size you desired.

If you want to change this to other scales here is a quick look at the sizes for some of the scales to make this same size mat.

1/48^th scale 3/8” by 5/8”

1/24^th scale 3/4” by 1 ¼”

1/12^th scale 1 ½” by 2 ½”

1/6^th scale 3” by 5”

1/3^rd scale 6” by 10”

Have fun with the project!