How to Make Mother's Day Place Mats

These practical and thoughtful place mats will bring a smile to your mother's face every time she sets the table.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Scissors
• Decorative Stickers
• Craft Glue Sticks
• Magazines
• White Paper Doilies Placemats
• Victoria Magazines
• Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion Magazines

1. Buy a package of white "doily" place mats with scalloped, decorative edges.
2. Go through your photo albums and pull out pictures of you and your mother, including ones from when you were a baby. Decide how many place mats you want to make and make sure you have at least five or six pictures for each one.
3. Take them to a copy shop (like Kinko's) and have color copies made.
4. Buy a few magazines with pretty spring pictures (such as "Martha Stewart Living" or "Victoria") or of your mother's hobbies (Dog Fancy, for example) and cut out the pictures you want to include in your collage. Make sure you cut out enough to fill your place mats - these pictures will be the background.
5. Purchase stickers of hummingbirds, cats, garden scenes - whatever your mother might like.
6. Sit down at your computer and write down a few poems or quotes that are meaningful to your mother, then print them out in a nice colored font.
7. Completely cover the square part of the place mat with the pictures you have cut out of the magazines.
8. Next, cut out the photos you had copied (cut them out in rounded shapes along the contours of the photo subjects) and glue them on top, leaving some of the magazine's clippings showing.
9. Cut out the quotes and verses and glue them on, making sure not to cover up any of your photos.
10. Add the stickers last to places that need a little more color.
11. Write a brief note to your mother on the back of each place mat wishing her a Happy Mother's Day. Include your name and the date.
12. Take them to the copy shop, have the place mats laminated, and then trim around the outside, following the curves of the place mat.
13. Place them in a large box, wrap them and give them to your mother on Mother's Day.

Tips & Warnings

• If you want to make a set of place mats but don't have enough photos, have your photos enlarged when they are color copied.
• To get the best effect, buy a "craft" glue stick made for gluing paper.