A Gift a Day Gift Twenty-Three: Travel Car Mat

This is a gift I made for one of my younger nephews.  They tend to be over at grandma's a lot, so I thought I'd make a car mat for the nephews to play cars on while they are over there.

For the main body of the mat I used some green duck fabric that I'd bought before my daughter was born and was making stuff for when the baby came.  I had some left over as back then I used to buy like 10 yards of fabric as I was always afraid I wouldn't have enough fabric (obviously I had a long way to go on the learning to sew front *laugh*).  I cut two pieces of equal size that looked about what I wanted for size (yes, it was that specific ;).

To make the roads and buildings and such I taped some computer paper together and cut it down to the exact same size as the top of the mat.  I then drew the roads and stuff onto the paper, cut them out, giving myself instructions on the pieces I cut (upper left, upper right, this side up, etc).  I then pinned the paper pieces to different colors of felt I had and cut out everything.  Then I pinned it to the top of the mat and sewed it all down.

I lastly embroidered the words onto the pieces, so that the boys would know where the gas station, the airfield and the store were.

After that I took the bottom of the mat and made a quick pouch attached to it for the boys to put their cars, airplanes and boats in before heading out to grandma's house, using a velcro closure.  I then sewed the main mat, right sides together and left about a 4" gap in one side to turn it right side out and then sewed that closed.  I also quilted through both layers along the main road on both sides as the pouch that I made on the back tended to weigh down the bottom layer and I didn't want it getting too out of whack.

Some things on the mat didn't turn out as well as I would have liked.  I would have preferred the roads be grey or black instead of light tan, but I didn't have the fabric and didn't have the money to go and get some special.  So, I did the best with what I had and then sewed the road lines in black for distinction (I felt yellow was going to look dirty too quickly).

So breakdowns?

Total Cost of Gift:  Free as I had everything I needed for this for quite a while.

Total Time to Make Gift:  Three hours.