Singer Featherweight - Cheap & Easy Drip Pan Felt Replacement

If your Featherweight could benefit from a new drip pan felt, here’s a $2 solution.

Single sheets of Stick-It craft felt are available in many craft stores for about two bucks. Online you'll  find packages of more than one, which will then raise your cost - in that case you might do just as well to buy a newly manufactured replacement pad, which is no better quality than the one you can make with these instructions.

We've created a template you can download to trace to create your felt replacement. The template is sized with some wiggle-room so that when you trace it onto the felt and cut it, your end-product will fit nicely into the tray.

Drip pan, $2 single Stick-It craft felt, and our free template.

The Stick-It product has a strong adhesive strip on the reverse. Perfect for this job.

The back side of the Stick-It felt product. $2 for a sheet.

Clean the area of your drip pan where your new felt will go. Sometimes the old felts leave a relatively clean surface; sometimes they leave stubborn goo. I trust that you can determine products and methods to clean the pan. Just make sure that you don’t leave any cleaner residue that will prohibit the new adhesive from adhering well. Otherwise, if your pan has especially stubborn glue, as long as you get the surface fairly smooth, your replacement felt should lay down nicely.

Once you have a clean surface, a final cleanse with just soapy water can leave a surface ready for an adhesive.

A reasonably clean drip pan interior side.

Download our template to create your felt cutout. Check, and double-check, that you are cutting it in the correct configuration to allow the adhesive side to adhere to the inside of your drip pan in the correct position with the felt fitting properly.

After cutting your template, make sure you like the way it fits in your pan. You can always reattempt or make your own adjustments to the template to your satisfaction, and you certainly want to do that while the backing is on the felt. It's sticky! You don't want to end up with the felt stuck in the incorrect position, so get the size right before peeling off the backing.

My template fits into the pan nicely. This is the paper template - NOT the Stick It product.

Marker and ink will not “stick” well to the reverse of the pad because the adhesive cover strip is so slick. Below, I've used some masking tape to adhere the template to the felt side. Common sense dictates that you can use one edge of your felt to accommodate the longest straight edge of your felt. You can use a Sharpie marker to trace it, but your lines might be very faint. Work under bright light or devise your own comfortable method - just get your felt cut out with the correct side up as shown below.

Tape can help you position the template for tracing and/or cutting.

Before removing the adhesive of your newly cut felt, place your felt pad into your drip pan as your last check for a proper fit. You can trim away any areas that don’t seem to fit nicely, but our template likely has left you with a nice fit.

Peel your adhesive and take care to lay the felt into the correct position. Don’t press hard until you know it’s in the right spot, because the adhesive is strong!

A newly installed felt pad.