We had the one from Ikea for years and my 5 year old decided that he wanted a new one. His preschool has a different one that he said he liked better.
I didn't really feel like paying $10 for a small little mat, so I decided to make a custom one. I found a piece of gray fake leather coated stuff with kind of a fuzzy back on it at Joann's that I thought would be good. I knew that I wanted something heavy so that it wouldn't wrinkle as much when it was out on the carpet. Having a wrinkly road really frustrates my son, so I wanted to avoid that.
I was going to go all fancy and make the mat look like our neighborhood, but it was too hard to scale it so that the roads were the right size while still fitting a lot of variety of roads on the mat.
Instead I asked him what kind of roads he wanted on his mat and incorporated those and a lot of crazy roads. I also included some straight blocks to fill in with houses or whatever should I ever feel like adding them.
I opened up photoshop (you could also use paint), and chose a nice thick circular brush with a hard edge. I had some google maps open in the background to kind of use as a template, but ended up just freehanding most of it.
Here is the image I ended up with, which you're free to grab and use if you want to make the same car mat for your boy or girl (because girls like playing with cars just as much as boys sometimes)!
From here, I taped my fabric up on the wall with painter's tape and borrowed a friend's projector to project my image onto my fabric. I had my more tech savvy husband help me get that all set up and then just moved the projector closer to get bigger roads.
You can see that some of it didn't fit on my fabric. You can either move the image around or simply wing those areas that are cut off when you get to the tracing part. I moved my image to the left, which you can see in the picture below.
We grabbed some cars to make sure the roads would be the right size and then once everything was set I started tracing.
This sounds long and tedious, but it was not. I think it only took 30-60 minutes.
I used a black washable crayola marker and kept a spray bottle and paper towels close by (just a wet paper towel would work as well) to erase any mess ups.
My little guy was so excited at this point and wanted me to take it off the wall ASAP so he could "check it out".
Then I had to be a mean mommy and tell him that I was going to give it to his cousin and I'd make him a different one later because I didn't want him to know that HE was getting it for Christmas. This may have caused a few tears...
Once everything was traced with washable marker, I traced again with Sharpie to get the permanent outline for the roads. At this point I realized that just leaving the roads gray was going to look lame, so I tried to figure out what to use to fill in the roads. I wasn't sure if acrylic/craft paint would work better or if a big Sharpie would adequately do the job.
I ended up with a Sharpie Magnum and it was AWESOME. It worked really well on my fabric and still left me with a nice dark black.
Next was the lines on the road. I was worried about peeling and cracking, so I tried some yellow finger nail polish first. The shine/reflective effect was kind of cool, but it didn't show up as well as I wanted.
So I went for the craft paint and it was great!
Painting the lines on all of the roads took the longest of any step, but it still wasn't bad.
My boy was SO excited when he opened up his present and discovered that the car mat actually WAS for him and not his cousin! He's been loving using it with blocks to make ramps and buildings, so I feel no need to add any houses or places to it until he asks for them. My artistic skills in that realm are pretty limited and they would all be hand drawn and painted on. Doesn't sound like much fun to me!
Here's the finished product!
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