How to Paint a Natural Fiber Rug

I had so much fun completing this project and am super excited to share it! A while back I was updating my porch and my parents gave me a natural fiber rug that my porch badly needed and it was in great shape. Well, life happens, and this rug was on its last leg a couple weeks ago.

Gross, right?

I was left with a choice- toss it out and buy a new one, or try to give it a new life. Project time!

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Even if you don't have an old rug, here's a relatively inexpensive choice.

I love bright colors and already had yellow adirondack chairs and a royal blue love seat so I knew I wanted a bright pattern that would coordinate with those pieces. I also love Aztec style designs and was inspired by this pattern I found on Google image.

Cute, right? So I headed off to Home Depot and started trying to create a color scheme with 5 colors that would coordinate with the yellow and royal blue that were already on the porch. I settled on these paints (all latex, by the way) and only had to buy one sample size of each to paint the whole rug.

Now, to get to work on the rug! The pattern I chose consists of triangles in 3 different sizes, so I created these patterns out of poster board.

I used the blue colored pencil to draw the pattern onto the rug. Now, I'm not a perfectionist, and I'm of the opinion that the imperfections of handmade things are what makes them beautiful, so I didn't draw the whole pattern... Basically I started each line with a couple of the triangles I was using on that row, and then went the rest of the way across just putting a line where the bottom and top of the rest of the triangles would be. By the time I finished, the whole rug looked like this:

Then I started painting! I started with the lightest color first (the mint) and then the next lightest (the grey), and then the rest. Here's what the process looked like:

And finally, the finished product!

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Wow, you found an old post! Did you know we're a food blog now?

If you love food, especially Southern food, you're going to love what we've done with the place. And just because I know if you've found this post you're probably sprucing up your outdoor space, here's a few cocktails that are just dying to be sipped on a porch with a handpainted rug.

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