Paint a Rug Party: work in progress

Last week I showed you pictures of my striped rug inspiration; this week I'm getting down to business.

I started with the cream colored 4 x 7-ish Ikea Erslev rug.  I have two of these rugs; they were the rugs in my master bedroom of our last house.  Currently one is in my master bathroom and the other was in my closet.  I pulled the one out of my closet because it was cleanest, and got to work.

I taped down a tarp in the garage and put the rug on top so the paint wouldn't bleed through.

Then lectured myself for taking a three year old to Lowes at 4 pm in the afternoon.  

With a measuring tape I measured the rug into approximate thirds.  With a woven rug its not that easy to make exact measurements; the rug is uneven on the sides and sort of stretchy.

At top and bottom I measured in 18.5 inches from either side, leaving the middle stripe a slightly smaller 18 inches.  I marked the spots lightly with a pen.  I did this multiple times down the rug.  

Then I connected the dots with a long level, drawing two long stripes down the rug.

Once I had the rug divided in thirds, I started taping.  I used two inch 3M painting tape, and I used scissors to make sure that each end edge of the tape was  straight (ie. I didn't rip off pieces of tape).

To make sure that the space between each stripe was equal, I used a small strip of tape as a spacer (see the little strip of tape between the spaces in the picture above?). Thus, the tape is a two inch stripe, and the open stripe is also two inches.  The very last stripe is a wee bit less than two inches, but its not very noticeable.

On the second row I started with the open space, and then the third row was started at the top again.

Surprisingly, it only took me about a half hour to tape the whole thing.

Easy, right?  Now we'll just paint the rug and be done with it, right?

Not so fast.

Since this is going in my master bathroom, where I will walk on it barefoot every day, I would like for it to be soft, not crusty with paint. This could be easily solved with textile medium, which turns regular paint into fabric paint.  Unfortunately, there is no textile medium to be had anywhere around here--I have been to every craft and paint store in the area, and no luck.  I can't find any recipes for making your own textile medium on the interwebs.

Before ordering the medium on Amazon, I thought I'd try other options.

I tried fabric spray paint.  I'd been thinking of trying this paint for various projects, but at $8 for a 2.5 oz bottle, it doesn't seem like it would go very far.

I was right, one bottle does not go very far.

And it doesn't exactly give a lot of coverage, either.

Also, despite being "fabric" paint, it is still on the crunchy side.

Next up, I experimented with fabric dye.  I used a smaller woven bathmat for this experiment, similar to the Erslev rug.

I fastened a spray bottle top to the fabric dye bottle and just sprayed the rug.  The fabric dye was mostly contained by the tape and didn't seep very much (although the spraying went everywhere).  After four days of drying time, the rug is mostly dry and not crunchy.  BUT the dye rubs off on my hands when I touch it, even though its dry.  Grr.  So this doesn't seem to be a very viable method.

I will note that I didn't bother washing the rug and then setting it in the dryer on high heat, as per the fabric dye instructions, because its not something I will be able to do with the bigger rug.  So perhaps that might impact the finish.

So, here we are.  I am debating ordering the textile medium, or just painting the rug and putting it in my foyer instead.  Come back next week and find out what I decided.

See the other participants and their painting processes:

Chinoiserie Chic

Design du Monde

Design Post Interiors

The Junk House

Little Black Door

My Best Friend Craig

My Crafty Home Life

Pawleys Island Posh

The Pink Pagoda

Room Rx

Seekers Bazaar

Simple Details