Handmade Placemats

Color your own personal paper for handmade placemats.

With just paper and glue, you can create handmade placemats to match any occasion and dining table decor. From seasonal themes to shared memories, customize your placemats with your own decorated paper and family photos. A coat of acrylic gloss medium or laminating makes the placemats water- and spill-proof.

Seasonal Cutouts

Create seasonal place mats from paper. Fold a sheet of white paper into quarters and cut shapes in the edges of the paper. Be careful not to cut away all the paper from the edges. Unfold the paper, and glue it to a piece of colored construction paper so that the color shows through the white cutouts. Cut out snowflakes for winter-themed place mats, tulips for spring, egg shapes for Easter, and leaves for fall. For an abstract look to the background, roughly tear different colors of construction paper into small shapes and glue them randomly to a whole sheet of backing paper.

Woven Mats

A woven placemat has strips of paper woven together at right angles to each other. Use strips of two different colors of construction paper of the same width for a uniform look. Create a placemat that looks like plaid by alternating two colors for one weaving direction and using white for the other. Strips of different widths arranged randomly give an abstract, spontaneous look to your placemat. Completely personalize your color choices by coloring your own paper with colored pencils, crayons or acrylic paints

Memories

Take inspiration from scrapbook and create placemats of your family members' memories. For a birthday celebration, use photos from the life of the birthday person. In the depths of winter, make a placemat with memories of the family's summer vacation. Use cardstock in the appropriate size as the base and glue scrapbook paper to it as the background. Photocopy photos and glue them to the base. Cut out text or write on the placemat using bright markers or glitter pens. Alternatively, ask family members to write their recollections of the photos on the placemats and collect them as keepsakes.

The Funny Side

Collect full-page comics from your weekend newspaper; these comics usually have a complete story on one page. As an alternative, collect several strips of the same comic. Remove the white borders from the comics and glue them to a piece of card. If you know any artists, ask them to create caricatures of your family and friends. Photocopy these, cut them out and arrange them in your own comic strip, perhaps telling a funny story from your time together.

References

• Artists Helping Children: Make Placemats Crafts for Kids
• Kaboose: Customized Placemats

Resources

• Artists Helping Children