DIY Painted Rug

So we went shopping for some nursery stuff this weekend at Ikea.  Long story short we bought a rug.  A plain, white, boring rug.  Which I was fine with….because it was $30, simple and well they don’t have anything in purple. Did I mention it was $30?  Well as sick as I am of painting and as much as my husband did not want to be wrangled into another project I just couldn’t leave well enough alone.  I got it in my head that I HAD to paint the rug. Yep, paint it. With regular ol’ house paint.  Painting fabric has been all over the blog world lately, so I figured why not?  {And this post in particular which shows a painted rug}.  I was sorta set on the chevron stripes {I know, so trend-a-licious right now…} and although it was a lot more time intensive and I couldn’t have done it without my husband, I’m really glad we went through the extra effort for the chevrons…here’s a little pictorial step by step.  The nursery’s not done by any means, but the final pic is a little sneak peak.

Figuring out the measurements and taping each row.

We used this piece of cardboard to draw our  line and then it became our measuring tool.  Totally the husband’s idea and totally brilliant.

The rug completely taped up.

All the lines are the same size, but since we kept some of the stripes white, the tape goes on the inside portion of each white stripe–thus they look smaller, but once you remove the tape they’re the same size.

Painting.

I used sort of a dry-brush technique.  I wanted a more worn-in look, and I didn’t really want each stripe to be solid paint because a) I knew it would just crack and look worn in eventually and b) I also knew it would just be really hard and stiff on those parts of the rug.  It’s obviously still a little stiff because you know, it’s just house paint.  {B wasn’t so convinced…he liked the idea of more solid color.  To each his own.}  You can also see that I went over each white line and covered it with packaging tape.  I didn’t want to take any chances of spilling on the white sections, and packaging tape is cheaper than covering it all in blue painter’s tape.  

All the stripes painted before removing the tape.

Doesn’t look that great, right?         

The final look.
I love how it turned out.This isn’t the best picture–it’s kinda dark–but I really love the final result.  It’s got a bold and sharp contrast, but kinda worn-looking at the same time.  I only used 2 sample sizes of paint {from Home Depot}.    As mentioned the rug is a $30 Ikea model {similar to this, but larger} and the total time investment was about 3.5 hours–included measuring and figuring out the right length, height and width of each stripe.

$30 rug, $6 in paint,  3.5 hours and a little elbow grease?
I’m sorry, but you just can’t beat that with a stick.