You know those fancy kitchen mats that are supposed to make it so much more comfy to complete all those standing kitchen tasks? I wasn't for a long time, interested. Then, I got a little older, right around the same time I lost a dishwasher in my kitchen. Suddenly, the idea of standing on something a little softer during the interminable hours spent washing dishes held a lot of appeal.

So when I spotted this foam mat - being marketed as a yoga mat, though it's really not one - at the dollar store, I brought it home.

When I first rolled it out, I considered using the whole thing.

You might be able to tell that it's larger than a standard yoga mat. It's also a bit thicker - between 1/4 and 1/2 an inch thick.

We kept it in the kitchen like this for a couple days to decide if we wanted the whole thing, or just a sink mat. It was delightfully comfy, but it did pick up and show dirt pretty easily - you can even see some of the dirt in this pic (sorry, gross) but that was useful info. In the end, we decided to just use the mat at the sink.

I used kitchen shears to cut it to size. Then I gathered a few supplies: White paint, two shades of aqua, a hexagon stencil I printed out from online, a foam roller and some paint brushes.

First, I painted the mat white (three coats). Then I traced my  hexagon into a pattern I liked. I played around with a more random design, but ended up hexagoning the whole thing, to sort of mimic tile.

Once my "tiles" were traced out, I hand painted them in, using my two blue paint colors as they were, and to mix my own blues. I did that using a highly scientific process of just dabbing on random bits of color and mixing right on the mat.

I have not yet sealed it with a coat of poly. There are a lot of coats of paint on it, and we don't wear shoes in the house, so I'm thinking it's possible it'll stand up to wear without a sealant. I keep you posted. In the meantime, I've got a pretty little mat here, and it's hard to overstate how nice it is to stand on. Really. Less than a half an inch of foam = life changing. So I guess those fancy mats are really onto something. Of course, they cost a bajillion bucks and they don't appear to come in shades of aqua, so I'll keep mine.