Padding Around

So you’re sitting around staring at your living room bored to death but completely stymied and frustrated cause there is just no way you can start anything with all of the things that you have on the schedule, the Fall Fling for the Arts and The Chair-ity Event both on Saturday and trying to find time to get by Pacific Park Gallery to see all of the Ole Trawler’s fantastic photographs. (The Long Sufferin’ has photos there two and if I didn’t mention it it would be a good way to learn the lesson that John Wayne Bobbit learned the hard way and all of the Ole Trawler is pretty attached to the way it has always been attached so I’d just as soon not have anything go missing which is why I have a long and happy marriage and am mentioning that the Long Sufferin has art at Pacific Park Gallery too!) And with all of that on your plate you just can’t start anything complex and time consuming and it is a long afternoon before the new programs start and so there you sit doing nothing and listening to your arteries harden and wondering just what will keep the mildew from growing on you and not a single idea comes into your head.

But have heart; the Ole Trawler comes to the rescue.

Now I know that you have followed all of the Ole Trawler’s suggestions and have done all of the things I have asked you to do and you went to Goodwill or The South Coast Hospice or the Salvation Army store and you found a cheap flat-bed scanner and you bought it and brought it home and went online and downloaded the software and now you have a perfectly good scanner just sitting around waiting to be put to work and it can’t go out and find stuff to scan all on its own so you have to pick something and scan it and this is the perfect time, while you are sitting around listening to those arteries and suddenly it all becomes clear…you should make a mouse pad.

Sure you already have one and you like it fine and you just don’t see what the big deal is it’s just a mouse pad that you use but never really look at or think about so why should you give a toss about something that’s like trash bags which you use but don’t much care about?

Cause it will help you get from now to Saturday without mildew growing all over you and mildew is so hard to remove and you don’t want to show up at the Fall Fling for the Arts with mildew all over you so this is a good way not to have to get out the Brill-O pads and besides you have been wondering just what you would do with that scanner the Ole Trawler was so insistent that you go out and resurrect and now you do have an idea and besides with the time that you saves not having to scrub off the mildew you can go to Pacific Park Gallery and if you do it first then you will have something interesting to talk about at the Fall Fling for the Arts so you will sound like an intelligent, wise and articulate person and fit right in with all of the other glitterati.

So do this…

You’ve been scanning in all of your art so that you have a complete digital record of your work so all you have to do is pick one of the many things you have been scanning in and that will be hard because you have so many but you are a brilliant, critical and discriminating artist and you will use your finely tuned and exacting artistic taste to select one of the best of the whole mess of brilliant things you have done and that will be the basis of the mouse pad.

To do this you need just three things, an image, a whatever to print on and a foam sheet.

The image you should have because you have been scanning in all of your images and so that part is easy and you can move on to the next part which is also easy and I’ll tell you why…

The experts and the crafty people who do this all of the time say that you should use Inkjet Printable Fabric sheets which can be had at almost any office supply store or on Amazon.com where you can buy anything from napkins to elephants just in case your name is Hannibal and you need the pachyderms to march over the alps so you can certainly get a printable fabric sheet there or…

You can use what I did and run a sheet of watercolor paper through your printer. Now to do that you will have to cut it down cause most watercolor paper is very large and won’t fit in the paper tray of a printer so cut it down and run it through the printer and there you have a wonderful, personal, colorful image for your mouse pad.

Oh come on most of you have more watercolor paper lying around just waiting to be used and most of the time all it does is live in the closet and it is time for it to come out of the closet cause this is a new century and we have “Don’t ask don’t Tell” so it is okay for watercolor paper to come out and this is the perfect time.

Now you have your image and the top part of the mouse pad its time to get the foam. You can get it lots of places but one of the easiest is Wally World. They have the sheets of eighth inch thickness which is thinner than I would like but it is easy to work with so try it and it is only thirty-three cents a sheet so you can buy it and feel guilt free or if you mess up the first pass, which will be hard to do with the Ole Trawler’s guidance so why not give it the old college try?

I also bought some cork at Fred Meyers, four 12 x 12 squares for five bucks, cheap, huh? I haven’t used it yet but it should also serve. So here’s what you do, you take the print and the foam or cork and go outside unless you have a big-time cushy studio in which case you can go there cause it is your space and no one can tell you what to do in your own space so even if you do spray toxic chemicals all around and fill the air with harmful fumes they can’t bitch and whine cause it is your space so there.

And you don’t have to use harmful chemicals you can use good old fashioned rubber cement or Elmer’s glue but I used 3M Spray Mount cause I am a photographer and always have a can handy so I used it but you don’t have to just because I did and can go your own way and everything will be perfectly fine.

But if you are using 3M Spray Mount spray both the back side of the image and the top side of the foam and then mash them together. You have to be fairly precise cause the foam just doesn’t cut all that easily and if you have more of it than you do image it will stick out and give the mouse pad an unfinished, unprofessional look. The thing to do is cut the foam with a pair of really sharp scissors and fit your image to that amount. Makes everything so much better.

Once you have the foam and the image mated together you should let them dry for a few minutes or press them under a heavy book like the coffee table book of pictures of elves you bought back a few years ago when fairies were everywhere and you thought you’d paint a few, just to see if you could get the hang of it and then flack them to the silly tourists only it was harder than you thought and the silly tourists didn’t come to the edge of the earth to buy paintings of fairies so they wanted landscapes and seascapes and cloudscapes which is what you were doing all ready before you bought the silly book and now it has been lying in the closet under all of the paintings of fairies that you did but couldn’t sell so why not let it serve some useful purpose and weigh down that mouse pad until it dries and then you will finally get some use out of the book.

Once it dries it is ready to use and if you don’t like the shape you can use those extra sharp scissors to cut it into any shape you like.

And why would you do all of this?

Well for one thing it is good to learn new skills and there is always a chance that you will need a extra present for Halloween or Thanksgiving or Christmas or Guy Fawke’s Day so why not learn how to do it just in case and even if you don’t you never know when your own mouse pad will give up the ghost and maybe it will happen when Wally World is closed and you can’t just go buy a new one and wouldn’t it be handy to know how to make one?

And maybe you want to give mouse pads for Christmas gifts and Staples and VistaPrint and Zazzle will do it for you pretty darned inexpensively but you might want to make a mock up before you order just to see if the image you had in mind will work as well as you thought it would. That’s the way the Big Guys do it and they should know cause they play for high stakes and make millions and can’t afford a pluck up cause it would cost them millions and be pretty embarrassing so why not follow their example and save yourself some grief.

It’s fun, cheap and it might just give you an idea for what to do with some of those projects lurking in your closets like all of those elves that never sold and now you can get them out of the closet and away to Aunt Brownhilde who you never really met but always feel obligated to send a present and now you can and get those damned elves the hell away from your closets.