I saw a beautiful picture of a mouse pad recently… that no longer is being made:

So what’s a girl to do?  Make her own version!  Well, at least it is my first attempt.  I have other ideas for more mouse pads.

Here is the finished production that I created using water based ‘size’ (gilding term for glue), and imitation gold leaf (the first one on the home page that’s $59), all from the online store Gilded Planet.

The mousepad I was working with was fabric, so in the future I plan on using a different method (‘fabric medium’ + spray paint / craft metallic paint), as with actual gold leaf on fabric I got lots of ‘cracks’ that I haven’t seen in regular gilding.  I have read that this is due to the nature of the fabric medium.  I had to go over the ‘crack’s in the fabric with a ‘gold pen’ I got from Micheal’s.  Although I want to try other ways to do this, and hopefully see no ‘cracking’ on the gilding / gold, this thing shimmers so much, I find it impossible that spray paint would shimmer as much.  Through this method, it does have an ‘aged gold’ look, but I’m digging it.  Then I sealed the whole thing (gilded side only), once it had dried for about 24 hours, with SafeCoat Acrylaq (awesome product, discovered it through Young House Love), a non-toxic, very safe, green, glossy, clear acrylic / poly.  (I bought a huge jug of this stuff almost a year ago, & it keeps going)  Once sealed, the mousepad has been great!

Other pictures of the process:

I used painters tape to separate the sides, one for gold leaf, one for non.  Then I spread the ‘water size’ (special gilding glue) onto the side I wanted to put gold leaf on, see below.

And another shot of the finished ‘aged gold’ look: