However, these mats sell for about $25 each. I was looking for a low cost alternative in order to do a repinning tutorial at our LI meeting. After thinking about it, I remembered the all-weather rubber mats. These are the kind you often see inside the entrance of a bulding in the winter time. They are rubber and have a corrugated surface. I thought this would be good for holding the pins stacks.
I located a few companies on the internet that sold these types of mats and sent a quick email asking for samples. Now before i get flamed about "how I am cheating these companies out of profits", please realize that these are literally scraps that they send out as samples. If you have a large group that needs mats or you want a bigger one, please consider ordering a piece of the mat from one of these companies. You can buy it by the foot. Also, you may want to check with your office building in the early spring. Many will have these mats that need thrown away after a hard winter. You can probably salvage pieces of them to use.
Anyway, after contacting a few different companies, I accquired the samples below.
There were a few different styles, but any of them would work for our purposes.
Next I had Bullet unpin a lock so you could see one of the mats in action:
Here's how I use the mats:
So that's the jist of it. Free pinning mats just for asking. Now you can probably incorporate them other ideas as well. My friend Marc said he always liked the idea of a felt work mat. He was going to glue a piece of the rubber mat to one corner of his felt covered mat just so he had a place to hold his pin stacks.
Hope this was helpful to someone. It very well may have been covered in the past on this board. I didn't search to try and find it.
