Patio Furniture, Cushions, Personalized Doormats

Doormats greet your family and friends before you even open the door.

Keep it cheery in the dreary weather, keep your home cleaner with someplace to wipe shoes and boots, and add some new character with a personalized doormat.

There are several main materials for doormats: rubber, cast aluminum (or iron, but iron is more prone to rust), wood, sisal, and coir (coconut fibers). Each one has advantages for different doormat needs. Many of the decorative styles of doormats are really miniature carpets with a rubber backing.

There are some sites on the internet that discuss making your own personalized doormat:

• Do it yourself Spray-Painting a Sisal Doormat — This article is well set out and tells you how to make a lattice pattern on a simple sisal doormat. This looks like it could be done on a coir mat as well. The stencil method is used.
• DIY craft welcome mat — This article takes a sisal mat and shows you how to decorate it with felt strips for a welcome message.
• DIY Floor Mats — This article also stresses stencil methods on natural fiber mats of jute or sisal or grass.
• So you say you want a revolution doormat? — More stencil doormat ideas for a coconut doormat. Not as thorough pictorial coverage, but some more specifics on paints to try.
• Painted Welcome Mat — Acrylic paints, spray varnish, and optional rubber stamps are used in this welcome mat construction. The rubber stamp idea is a great help for those of us who can’t draw or cut out stencils with any skill whatsoever.

After reading up on doormats, making your own doormats, and what’s available commercially online, it became interesting to look for ink sublimation personalized doormats. After all, you can upload images to places like cafepress.com and have a mug or a t-shirt printed, why not a doormat?

Most of the custom personalized doormats available are customizable with your name or a text message, not your own image. There are lovely models available, like this cool pineapple personalized arch doormat:

The cool thing about the pineapple motif is that you can get all sorts of other outdoor decor in pineapple motif, also. Like pineapple welcome plaque:



and pineapple weathervane:


and a bunch more stuff.

But nobody seems to be offering an “upload your image and print your own doormat” service yet.
The closest thing seems to be Empirescreen.com which offers dye sublimation printing on doormats. You can email in your graphic file or even send it in on disk. While not quite as immediately gratifying as uploading your image and ordering already, it just might do.

So don’t have a boring doormat this winter, buy or make something exciting, personal, custom, and cool! Think of someone whose face you’d like to wipe mud on every day! Your mother-in-law, your boss, your ex-husband? They’ll think you’re flattering them with a personalized doormat, while you walk all over them every day. The possibilities are endless.