July 26, 2019

Painting a Faux Rag Rug

I love rag rugs, I especially love making them. I have made over 50 rugs from old sheets, and I really wanted a couple for my “she shed”. I won’t be using it in the winter months, so I really wanted to stay away from anything fabric, and I happen to see a post on Color Me Thrify, and decided to give it a try 🙂 I can paint furniture, walls, etc, but I cannot paint flowers or trees or anything like that !! I have tried paint and sips and they have always been a disaster, stripes? I think I can handle that 🙂

I gathered together all of my small paint oops samples from my local hardware stores that would match my color scheme, and then taped off where I wanted the rug to go. I happen to have a metal L carpenters ruler and that seemed to be a good width, and my work bench seemed to be a great length, so that made it easy. I used painters tape, which didn’t work out very well, since I painted my floor with porch paint that had grit in it. I couldn’t think of anything else, so I was just very careful with the base coat. For my base coat was Kilz 2, I use it often and love it. I let everything dry for 24 hours and then used my metal L ruler to mark off my pattern repeat.

I wanted this to look like a rag rug, not patterned wallpaper, I wanted my stripes to be somewhat wavy, if you know what I mean….. Now for the real fun, painting. This is rather time consuming, since you have to wait for the paint to dry, but I had another project I was working on. Once my stripes were done and dry, I added the fringe. The fringe is random, no spacing, but I did tape off the area I wanted for fringe.

Color Me Thrifty added a few coats of polyurethane, but I will see how it goes without it. I don’t have good luck with polyurethane, and I have tried every non-yellowing brand and they still turn yellow over years.

I really loved the way this came out, and have already started another one. I used exterior paint, but with the grit floor, I am not sure how it will hold up, fingers crossed!! I can always paint over it 🙁

I mentioned oops paint earlier, and if this is new to you, you have been missing out. It is the greatest thing and cheap (and we all know I am frugal). Look at these prices!! I find Lowe’s to be cheaper than Home Depot and Walmart rarely has oops paint.

I did a close-up picture so you could see the colors, they are really brighter in person.