Even More Rug Love

This morning I thought I'd put up the guest post that I did for Cassie at Primitive and Proper.  It's a fun one, with some reminiscing of past projects as well as an awesome new one.  Enjoy!

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Hi Primitive and Proper readers!  I'm super excited and flattered to be here today, thanks to Cassie, whose work I so admire! She's awesome, right?  

To begin, let me just start with a BIG disclaimer: I am in no way a professional designer, nor do I play one on the Internet.  There are so many ladies here in blogland with an amazing talent for creating amazing interiors.  Like, unreal talent. I am not in that league. But I do love furniture and paint.  I've taught myself to refinish furniture through trial and lots of error over the past 10 or so years and that is what I really love to do.  But that's not exactly what I'm posting about today.  Today I thought I'd write a little bit about painting rugs.

Maybe we're just crazy messy, but pretty rugs never last under our table.  I lamented the fact here.  Just, you know, 4 kids=gross mess mushed into the rug.  But I love the look of a rug under a table, plus- maybe its just us again-but I felt like we were scratching up our wood floor.  I know, chair pads.  Seriously, those never stick.  So I took the crafty blogger's best friend, the Fabulous Canvas Drop Cloth, and made a rug that was easy to sweep and easy to mop. Basically painted on my design and coated with poly.  Stick it to the floor with rug tape, and wha-lah.  Easy to walk on, easy to clean, easy on the eyes. 

Then I made this adorable flower rug for my even more adorable sister-in-law.

 In the beginning of this year, my first canvas rug gave up.  So I improved upon the design with more paint and way more poly to make it a little stronger and I think the quality is quite a bit better. 

I think it gives this area just the right amount of color.  You can read about my whole process for this rug here.

 Now enter the real challenge: I have this green shag number in my seldom used, seldom decorated Front Room.  Its in good shape, but I'm tired of the shag and over the dark color.  And I didn't want a shiny, waterproof rug there.  Although, around here anything wipe-able is usually best...  Also, it needed to be a little beefier than a drop cloth.

 I remembered I had the old stretched-out flat weave rug from, ironically enough, under the kitchen table, stashed in the basement.  It's a basic brown indoor/outdoor from Pier One via Big Lots.  I decided it would be my guinea pig.  I didn't want to spend any money on this experiment because I didn't know how it would turn out.  I used the back (pictured) because the weave was flatter than the top.

I coated it with some really old, gloopy paint I had left over that I could never use on anything else.  It sucked it up like a thirsty sailor and asked for more.  So I rolled on one more coat of $10/gallon white paint from Walmart.   With the lighter-weight canvas rugs, after the base coat I've used drapery clips to hang the drop cloth from nails pounded into studs in my basement and use our projector to trace a pattern-'cause I'm no free-hander. I planned to use the same technique to create a subtle zebra print in taupe.  But this was a huge, heavy rug to begin with and after it sucked up all that paint it was a monster.  So scratch hanging it from the studs.  So I decided to go with the crafty blogger's next best friend, Chevron.  I got out my trusty measuring stick and went to town with a pencil.  I measured the rug into thirds and then the added horizontal trace marks every 13 1/2 inches.  Then I used the measuring stick again to trace a diagonal line from each intersecting point.  Does that make sense?  The pencil marks in the picture are faint, but they're there. Go ahead click to make bigger.  Next I painted with the leftover paint from my new kitchen rug.  Didn't want to spend any $, remember?  I added some black to make it a little darker, although you can't see both rugs from the same spot anyway. 

It was a little shiny and rough, so I hand sanded it randomly.  Also, I stand by the fact

that sanding and distressing in all things hides a multitude of sins:)

And here it is!  A long way from perfect, but good enough :) I feel like it really lightens up the room. And makes me hate the ugly sofas just a little less.  As a side note I will say that this rug is a little rough, but not bad.  This area is super low traffic. I wouldn't put in our family room where we relax and spend a lot of time on the floor.  Also as a side note, remember I am no designer.  But imagine an awesome coffee table, badly needed reupholstered/slip covered sofas, lamps, sides tables, the works.  Its coming.

Thank you again so much Cassie!  Its been so fun!

Emily