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How to Care for Cutting Mats

Kelly Hanson

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Duration:   4  mins

Description

As a quilter, it is important to take proper care of our cutting mats to make sure they stay in their best condition. Quilter Kelly Hanson shares some tips on how to care for your cutting mats, and shows the supplies needed to clean and maintain them. Watch this quick quilting tip to keep your cutting mat in tip top shape.

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18 Responses to “How to Care for Cutting Mats”

  1. Dawnette Watts

    How do you store your cutting mat without it bending and getting out of flat place? Yes

  2. Janice

    Wasn't able to get the discussion

  3. Brenda Ash

    How often would you suggest to do this cleaning of the mat?

  4. ELIZABETH

    If I clean my mat in the shower what are the proportions of vinegar, palmolive and water to put in a spray bottle. I don't have anywhere big enough to put it in a tub. Thank you, my mat definitely needs cleaning. Also how do you get cut marks out of the mat, does this washing help heal the mat.

  5. PAULETTE

    Thank you for this! I didn't understand how much gentle soap (Ivory) to use. I had recently heard something to the effect of this procedure; very glad to have it in video form. Did the Online Video Streaming Community come up with a "recipe" for this cleaning/moisturizing of a cutting mat? Again, thanks! pj stitches!

  6. jkmccnh

    For very large mats can I put the cleaning solution in a spray bottle, the mat on a towel, and spritz the mat, then rinse the mat in a cool shower, and air dry on a towel?

  7. Mona Serpe

    I have 2 large mats that won’t lay flat in my tub. One is 36x59 1/4” and one 24 3/4x37”. How do I clean these?

  8. Susan Conner

    Wish you had this available as text document. I have lost more than 50% of my hearing and have found these videos are very difficult, if nnot impossible, to understand.

  9. Paleoriffic

    No audio after introduction. Do I need to pay for it?

  10. Brenda

    My mat was use is an ironing board and has a warp, can cleaning and laying it flat to dry eliminate the warp?

There's been a lot of talk lately about how to care for your cutting mat. So today I decided that I would bring in my cutting mat and some of the supplies that you're going to need to be able to totally care for that mat and keep the moisture within it. I brought my little rotary mat. The nice thing about that is you can take it off from its base and you'd be able to clean the mat without any problem. The first thing that we want to do before we start cleaning the mat is I take a little scrubby like this and I just move it around, trying to get off any excess anything that's on it. It could be threads. It could be maybe a buildup of a chemical or something. I oftentimes will use my glue stick on my cutting mat surface, knowing that I can wash that off. The next thing that we do is we take this into a kitchen sink or perhaps a bathtub. That's what I have found works best, especially if you've got one of the larger mats. What we want is we want to use a mushroom brush for vegetables. We don't want the bristles being too hard because we're going to be scrubbing it once it's inside the tub. What we are going to use, and I have an example here, this is one gallon of distilled water. Now, if you put it in your tub, you're gonna be using your water from your tub, so you need to kinda make a guesstimate at how many gallons you've used. Then we are gonna take white vinegar. And this is the container that white vinegar will come in. And we're gonna take our nice little handy measuring cup, and we're going to measure a quarter cup of vinegar, white vinegar, for every gallon of water. We're gonna put that in the water, and it's cool water, not hot water. Hot water will make our mat warp, even warm water will. So we want to make sure that it's cool water and it's lying flat. As we let it sit, we let it sit for approximately 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, you're going to go and you're going to take a very, very delicate and soft detergent, something that is very mild. I have Palmolive here, I also like Ivory. Those are two very mild soaps. Ivory, the nice thing about that is it's just white and clear and not gonna make any color in the tub, so you don't have to risk staining your mat at all. I used green today because with the dove, because it was green and I couldn't find any other in the area that I was at. And I thought, well, the mat's green, so this is all good. And we're gonna put that inside the tub water. Now we don't have to let it sit or anything at this point. Now what we do is we're gonna want to scrub it. Once you've scrubbed it down and you've rinsed it in cold or cool water, then you're gonna take and you're gonna take two towels, and you're going to place your mat, your wet mat, on the towel. And then you're gonna place a towel on top of it, and you're just gonna blot it dry. Another thing you could do is air dry it, but the problem is is that has to be flat. You don't want it be sitting on its side. And so if you're lying it flat, the bottom may still have moisture, and so that moisture won't come out. It'll start getting smelly and maybe change color. So we wanna make sure that it's dry before we do anything else with it. And then once it's all complete, just put it back together, if you've got one of these mats, or if it's a mat that you just normally will cut on that isn't a rotating mat like this. And I want you to take a before and after picture. It's really interesting when you see exactly how clean your mat has gotten or how dirty it actually was. It will take out any discolorations from fabrics. It will take out any discolorations from ink. I did have one instance where the ink was so set in and it wasn't because of me. I had a customer that came up and was writing something and her ink pen broke. So that was just a situation, but it took out so much of it that I could not believe it. I was very thrilled. But the best thing of all is that it moisturizes your mat. Now here's another little tip After you get that mat out of your tub, if you have a smelly dog, throw him in, that's what I did. It ended up making my dog smell better than he's ever smelled before. The vinegar took all of the excess smells out of him.

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