No Sew Fabric Tutorial: Mouse Pad Upgrade

I'm all about the quick DIYs this month. And office projects... since Sean finished building my studio furniture and now the rest is up to me! (I promise I haven't forgotten about posting pics of my studio... the building took a bit longer than we thought and I still have some finishing touches to do with decor and such so stay tuned.)

So for entirely too long, I've been using this ugly, boring, black mouse pad.

And it's seen better days.

Silly. Some day maybe I'll stop living like a college student and realize it's ok to have nice things... especially ridiculously inexpensive things like a mouse pad. But, why buy when you can DIY, amiright? Plus, the part of the mouse pad I had that was damaged was really only the top fabric layer. So I thought, pshhh... I've got tons of fabric! Let's test it out.

First, I peeled off the fabric layer to reveal the equally as ugly (covered in glue remnants) backing.

After disposing of the (disgusting) fabric layer, I got out some other supplies:

I traced the mouse pad onto the Craft Fuse:

And then I cut out and ironed the Craft Fuse to my fabric.

Then I cut out the fabric to the same shape as the Craft Fuse.

My initial idea was to use Wonder Under, or some kind of fusible interfacing that became sticky on both sides when heated to fuse the layers together. But then I realized that my mouse pad backing is rubber... and an iron would likely do some melting on that kind of material. So I stuck with fabric glue:

Spray adhesive would also be a great idea for this project, but I didn't have any on hand so I stuck with what I had in stock. I chose to add a layer of felt to the back of my mouse pad too, because my furniture is white and the black layer was leaving a little mark on the desk top. I just used a little bead around all the edges on both sides of the black backing to adhere the fabric on top and the felt on bottom.

I waited a few minutes to make sure the layers were secure and dry, and then trimmed off the excess felt with my rotary cutter. I also added a little bit of Fray Check to the edges of the fabric layer just in case.

 And that's it! Now my mouse pad is back where it belongs, looking much, much prettier:

And sporting some Clever Betty style in the process.

Now how easy was that? 10 minutes, some scissors, glue, and an iron, and my computer desk is looking quite a bit happier these days.