Kitchen Living Room

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Paint a Rug...Why Not?

Now that I've been in the condo for what feels like quite a long time, I'm really ready to have some rugs on the floor! Rugs are expensive, so I decided I would try to paint one myself. I went to Hobby Lobby in search of fabric paint. I could only find black (see the picture below) in spray paint format, but I wanted something more colorful. 

Black Fabric Spraypaint

Instead, I used a free can of paint (with coupon) from Ace Hardware with fabric medium. Fabric medium is this gloopy liquid that you mix in with regular wall paint. It allows the paint to adhere to the fabric better, and it also prevents the fabric from becoming really crunchy. I grabbed this stuff from Hobby Lobby for about $3 (after coupon):

Textile Medium

The paint color I picked was Sun Dried Tomato Red by Clark + Kensington. It's more of a coral than a red. I picked it to match some of the colors in the room such as the desk & chair and large bed pillow. I grabbed a $60 rug from Ikea, which is the cheapest low-pile white rug I could find in a large size. It's the Erslev rug and it's about 6 x 8 feet.

Ikea Erslev Rug

I laid the rug out on the floor to see if it was about the right size.


It's pretty much a perfect fit. It goes under the bed a little, which is fine. 


Next I decided what pattern I wanted to paint. I decided to go with easy stripes since this is my first rug-painting experience. The stripes will also match the large pillow I keep on my bed - you can see it on my chair in the top right corner of the picture above. After deciding on the pattern, I measured out how big my stripes would have to be in order to evenly space them out along the rug - about 6" wide. I left any extra on the edges of the rug, since at least one edge will be under the bed. After mixing the textile medium into the paint can, I stuck down some painter's tape to mark where I wanted to paint, and then I got to painting!


So far so good. I've actually FINISHED this one stripe at this point, but I don't have a picture. Yep, only one stripe so far. The most difficult part is definitely the putting down the tape part.


Painting a rug is actually really fun. It definitely feels like something you shouldn't be doing!

2 comments:

  1. excited to see the finished project, but know it might be a bit longer to wait!! I am working on my latest project - decorating my white canvas Converse hightops! EXCITING TIMES!!

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  2. Nice! You should write a tutorial. I will post it.

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