a real rug tutorial.

i spent a long weekend in boise with amos lee + andi.

heyyyyy. amos + andi.  cute.

andi time is precious time because we live 350 miles apart and only see each other when there are 321537 other things happening at the same time. play time is a commodity.

i broke the rules of The Project in the name of having andi's diy expertise at my disposal for hours on end.  days, really.

what started with this tutorial, which was really really pretty but didn't tell me the guts of what i needed to know.  namely - how to get your chevron lines so perfectly straight.  i'm certain there is some math involved, but if it took any more than 7th grade skill - i'm no good for it.

that and a realization that chevron pattern was sooooo early 2011 and we're inching near late 2011 and i'd hate to be/do/live with anything passe. 

so we opted for something a little more fresh. and a lot more interesting if you ask me:

a homemade version of ikea's stolkholm rand rug.

tools:

this $40 rug.

2 quarts of paint. i chose gold.

green masking tape {go green. i promise.}

a drop cloth.

a small {4"} paint roller.

pencil + yard stick.

your most handy, crafty, generous, willing-to-break-her-back-and-ruin-her-knees, loyal friend.

true to the original, i measured this rug in thirds and marked tick marks about every 6 or 8 inches down the length of the rug.  i'm sure this is doable with the snap a chalk line, but to be sure my lines were straight and to humor my practically perfect-ness, i measured, and measured again.

because the two outside panels are on the same "line", we taped across the whole rug.

in my case, since we had a 4" roller, we measured 3.5" stripes.  this made it easy to roll within the tape marks and get the whole stripe covered with a single swoop of the roller.  there was a total of 22 stripes.  11 to be painted, 11 to be left as is.

after we got our horizontal lines taped, we taped the vertical lines.

silly us, we got all the rug entirely taped before i realized our tape needed to mark the outside lines of the painted stripes, rather than taping directly below each line..

don't do this:

do this instead:

pull up every other piece of tape and replace them in their proper place.

the wider stripes were ready to be painted. the skinny stripes were left bare.

we were careful around the edges. the natural fibers of the rug are porous.  there's nothing we could do to prevent it from seeping through the fibers.  we were careful with the paint.... not overly generous like we could be if we had slapped it on a wall.  less is more when painting a rug.

after the paint dried, we lifted all the tape and used the gold lines to place the tape to mark the inside stripes -  exactly offset from the outside stripes.

tape. roll. rinse. repeat.

bonus, if you do it in the exact heat of the day, you'll cry in misery but your paint will dry really really fast.

a prize goes out to the person who points out the flaw in my rug.

hugs and kisses and a sigh of relief if no one does... because that means it's not severe enough to pull out the tape and the paint all over again to fix the non-apparent issue.