How to Paint an Entry Rug

So I’ve had this rug complete for over a week now. But there was something funny going on with my website that would not let me upload images. And what good is a how-to tutorial without images? No good at all, I’d say! Thanks to some deep digging from my buddy and webmaster it’s fixed and I’m getting back on track!I teased the finished rug on Instagram (so click over to follow me!).

Rain rain go away! I’m tired of the summer thunderstorms that have been rolling through almost everyday this week! So I’m dreaming of a sunnier day when I made this new rug for our back door. #sneakpeek #detailscomingsoon #rainraingoaway

A photo posted by Chelsea Lipford Wolf (@checkinginwithchelsea) on Jul 21, 2016 at 12:16pm PDT

And now I’m here to deliver on my promise of the details!

When I bought my house back in 2011, there were a few random things left behind from the previous owner that were in decent shape. So I kept them around. One of those items was this rug that I’ve used by the back door ever since.

It’s very unimpressive and never looks clean even when it’s freshly laundered. I’ve found plenty of rugs in stores to replace it with. But between the back door and the adjacent laundry door, I needed a very low profile rug in order for both doors to open over it. So when I found this indoor/outdoor rug in a local closeout store, Dirt Cheap, for $2, I bought 3!

The inspiration for my rug came via this one I found somewhere on the World Wide Web.

(source unknown)

I decided this design wasn’t really conducive to using painter’s tape like I used for my outdoor area rug. Instead I created a stamp from a sponge, or scouring pad, that I repeated over 40 times to cover the entire rug.

My rug measured 45″ by 28″. A 5 inch repeating design seemed like a good size. I cut my sponge to 5.6″x5″ so it could repeat an even amount of times in both directions.

Once my stamp and backup stamp were ready, I mixed up my paint. I used the blue paint leftover from our guest room walls and mixed it with the purplish blue (Velvet Sky by Behr) we used on the ceiling in the kitchen and the walls in the sunroom, where this rug now lives. Then I mixed it with fabric medium. Fabric medium is the magical stuff that turns any ordinary latex paint into fabric paint. The ratio is 1 part fabric medium to 2 parts latex paint. You can find it in the paint aisle of the craft store.

I used fabric medium when painting my outdoor rug and the upholstered chair in my sister’s room. So be sure to check out those posts if you’re interested in more info on the stuff!

Before I started stamping, I dampened the area of my first row with a spray bottle filled with water. This helps the paint soak a little further down into the fibers of the rug instead of sitting on top and getting crusty and flaky. (Make sure your rug is on a piece of plastic or drop cloth before you start. The paint can bleed through during the process!)

Then I started stamping.

Enough paint transferred to the rug to provide an outline of the diamond.

So after the first coat of the diamond pattern was complete, I immediately filled in all of the diamonds with the same paint mixture and a small foam brush, carefully dabbing inside the lines.

What I meant to do with the stamp and what I actually did are unfortunately 2 different things. I should have cut a circular, half-moon into the straight edges of my diamond to better replicate my design inspiration. But since I got too excited and started stamping before I thought about it, I went back and added a circle in the empty space between the diamonds. I used another scouring pad from my jumbo pack to create the right-sized circle, mixed up some more paint in a slightly lighter color, and stamped that until done. The circles also required going back over them with a second coat.

But I couldn’t stop there. I pulled out the gold fabric paint leftover from painting Roman shades for Mary Helen’s room and one of the pouncers I bought when I painted my craft closet and stamped a gold circle inside each diamond.

This time instead of applying my second coat with a foam brush, I was able to just “pounce” each one a second time.

After it dried for 24 hours, I flipped it over and applied several beads of 100% silicone to the bottom. This is a cheap way to make any rug anti-slip! Thinner than using a rug pad, which is ideal since I needed the rug to be as thin as possible!

Of course the silicone has to dry for another 24 hours before you can flip it back over. But then the rug is ready for foot-wiping action!

I love the rug on its own, but it’s taking a little bit to get used to it next to the main rug in our sunroom. I love the look of mixed patterns, but have a hard time doing it in my own home!

But when I think about how little I spent on this project, I’d be ok with trading it out for something else in a few month’s time! (Hey, I do have 2 more rugs I could fancy up!) Since I had most of the materials on hand already, I spent a total of $10 for this project, $2 for the rug, $6 for my jumbo pack of scouring pads of which I still have about 6, and $2 for the fabric medium using a coupon. It took about 8 hours of my time with my multi-layered design. So, all in all not bad!