Build Notes: Forage Mat
We’ve been trying to think of ways to keep Tangent entertained now that he’ll be an only pig for a while, and building a forage mat seemed like a good idea. But we couldn’t build the standard multi-color brain bending bright forage mat you see so often. Ours had to have some ModPig swagger… in the form of our icon!
Our ModPig icon actually lends itself really well to this project. It’s mostly rectangular, and simple enough in detail to read really nicely, even on a shaggy mat. We set to work figuring out how to translate the icon onto fabric.
At first we thought about printing it on our laser printer, and cutting it out to trace a template onto the fabric. But tracing around paper is not all that accurate. Then we debated printing it out on posterboard at a print shop - that could work well because it would be quite sturdy and reusable, but that was expensive and inconvenient.
Finally we had the idea to 3D print a template. The only problem was that the print bed on our Bambu printer is nowhere big enough to print a 12” x 17” mat. Hmmm. And then we realized we could break the icon into parts. YES! We got to work setting it up to print on three different plates.
The first draft was going to take an hour per plate which seemed pretty ridiculous. And then we remembered we recently picked up some different nozzles for the printer, and thought we’d see what happened if we switched from a .4 nozzle to a .8 nozzle which would allow more filament to come out at a time. This ended up cutting the print time in half, and producing a pleasing ridged texture which makes it easy to grip the template.
And so we ended up with this beauty - a reusable template of our icon that we know we’ll use in many ways. Rather than waste our good brand-colored filament on it, we opted to use the annoying silver filament we still regret buying but is great for prototypes or functional things.
We decided to use some fleece we already had on hand that wouldn’t be quite up to our standards to use for a waterproof mat, but would be perfect for foraging on. We used the template to trace the icon.
Now that we had the base layer, it was time to cut some strips of fleece. We opted to cut strips in 2” widths. The idea is that we would take a long strip, fold it in half lengthwise, and then sew it onto the base right along the fold. We started with the eyes, sewing dark gray strips in circles. Then we moved onto the right half of the face, basing the strip lines on the swoop that goes through the piggy face. It goes pretty fast. After the strips were sewn, we used scissors to snip lines into the fleece to create the forage mat/shag rug effect.
We snipped the fleece on the right side of the face after we sewed each row, and then realized it was faster to sew the rows first and do all the snipping after.
After all the snips are done, we cut around the outline to get rid of the excess fleece. And the finished project looks really good!
And most importantly, Tangent went after that mat with such delight and ate until he passed out into a nap. And as soon as he woke up, he headed immediately back there to see if he could uncover any more goodies. A resounding success!
