Painted Rug

Long time no see.  I've been busy gardening, being with friends and family and enjoying summer in the mountains.  I've done some projects this summer but haven't gotten around to blogging about them.  Today I'm doing a post on a project I just completed.

This is a flat woven rug that I have in my kitchen.  It is in the traffic pattern to my back door.  It's hard to tell from this picture but it has several spots that are impossible to clean.  Every time I try to clean a spot, I get a bigger faded spot in the rug.  I decided to paint the rug.  I bought paint to match some of the other colors in the room.  When I started rolling on the paint I could tell that the rug was going to soak up a lot of paint.  I went to my paint stash and chose some left over house paint to use like a primer.  The first coat on the rug was three different colors of paint.

I measured in 16 inches all around the border and applied blue painters tape.  I then painted the inside of the taped area one color and the outside a lighter color.

After this step I divided the inside section of the rug into thirds , width wise and length wise.  I taped large diamond in these nine rectangles.

I then painted a second color on some of the diamonds.

The red border is added around the diamonds.

I then taped all the diagonal lines beside the rows of diamond in one direction and painted the red.

Then the diagonal lines in the other direction were painted.

I painted the fabric border of the rug in the darker diamond color.

Now the pattern is completed.

And here it is with the table back in place.

I used regular latex house paint.  Some of it was a satin finish and some of it was flat.  Some was exterior and some interior.  It definitely looks cleaner than the original rug did and I like the addition of the red bordered diamonds.  I think it adds positively to the look of the room.