Paint A Rug For A Quick Refresh

Here’s a look at the snags close up. The white stripes weren’t a bright white either. They have a slight blue hue from the blue color bleeding from being laundered.

I love the simple striped design, so I decided I’d stick with that same pattern.

If you’re wanting to really transform a rug and start with a clean slate, you can definitely paint a new design on your rug!

The first step was simply to add frog tape to the edges of the blue stripes.

Be sure to firmly press the edge of tape down to ensure a nice crisp paint line.

Once all of the frog tape has been applied, it’s ready to be painted.

To ensure your rug will hold up through laundering, you’ll want to use a fabric medium with your paint. We had Delta Ceramcoat Textile Medium on hand from a previous project.

The fabric medium will prevent bleeding of colors and creates a smooth flow of paint on fabrics. It will also help the color penetrate into the fabric fibers, which will make the paint bond to the fabric.

For the paint we’re using leftover, Behr Paint & Primer color matched to Benjamin Moore, Hale Navy.

Add a 2:1 ratio of paint to textile medium. For this 2×4 rug, we mixed 4 T. paint with 2 T. fabric medium.

Stir until combined. Note that the fabric medium will make the paint a little bit more runny, this is what helps the paint penetrate into the fabric fibers.

The quality of your brush really will make a difference on any painting project.

We prefer using a brush by Purdy. We love their brushes, while they are a little more expensive, they are well worth it. We get much better results.

Begin by placing the brush on the edge of the frog tape and brush inward toward the fabric. This will help prevent any bleeding.

Fabric fibers really soak up the paint. Even if you think you’ve covered your area heavily, be sure to give it a second coat.

In this case, since we already began with an existing blue stripe, it acted as a first coat of paint, so we were able to get away with only one coat of paint.

After each of the stripes had been painted we pulled the frog tape off. This is best to do while the paint is still wet.

Now would you have ever thought to paint a rug? Look what a difference it made!

We only added blue paint, but having those stripes more rich in color, gives the illusion of a more bright white too.

I absolutely love the navy and white stripes on our front porch! It creates such a fun and relaxed feel to our small space.

If you’d like to see what patriotic elements we used for our porch decor you can take a tour of our porch here.

Thanks for stopping by!

And as always here at Sunny Side Design

WE HOPE TO BRING YOUR HOME TO THE SUNNY SIDE OF THE STREET!

To see more examples of painting on fabric click here.

To take a tour of this patriotic porch click here.