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
