I am SO proud of my DIY zig zag rug--Tutorial!
I was so excited to copy these gorgeous zig zag rugs:
(West Elm)
(Madeline Weinrib Atelier)
(West Elm Rug, Rachel of Kenzipoo's house)
(West Elm rug, from Four Walls and a Roof)
(Madeline Weinrib rug in Nicole Balch's home, from Making it Lovely)
(Domino)
Anyway, LOVING these zig zag patterns, and the West Elm one really isn't that overpriced, but I didn't want to spend $100-600 or whatever, depending on the size. But I really thought my bedroom needed some zig zag in it! And I have enough to put on the walls, so I wanted to make a zig zag rug. I thought about taking a plain white cotton rug and freezer paper stenciling the zig zags, then painting black on it, but I couldn't find any plain, cheap white rugs and they all had to much texture anyway. So I went old-school. Remember floor cloths?
To DIM (do it myself), I bought a yard of white "duck cloth," which actually comes in a lot of lovely colors at JoAnn for $7.99/yard. It's really sturdy and has a clear weave to it, not like twill, just straight-grain. Anyway I had a coupon, but because of some sale and the piece I got had some dust on it so she counted it as a remnant... it ended up being $2.73 for the yard-sized piece. It's about 60" wide, too, so it was about the size of a 3'x5' rug. See, here is it is folded in half.
So here's my tutorial.
- Fold a 1-2" hem around all the edges . I wanted mine to be sturdy and have a lot of weight on the edges, so it won't roll or fold up a lot.
- I tested the freezer paper with my craft paint (black acrylic paint mixed 2:1 with fabric medium). You can sort of see the freezer paper scrap on the underside of the hemmed rug, with a smudge of black paint on it.
- Cut your freezer paper strips into 2" long pieces. Cut those into pieces 3 3/4", 5 5/8", and a few pieces just under 2" squares. I didn't count how many I needed, but... a lot. Most of the ones I needed were the 3 3/4" size.
- Lay the strips out on the rug at one corner. I used a 45 degree angle. Iron it down in rows.
- In order to space the next row, use the spare strips or a ruler to measure 2" from the top row.
- Repeat this all the way down! I stopped halfway through to paint the first side, because I was so excited to see the end result and because I was sort of afraid of the corners coming up as I kept moving the rug and bending it a little to get the next row down. Sorry, no pics of this part...
- Peel the freezer paper off! It's not perfect, but it gets the look!
- Last step: I realized I needed to protect the unpainted parts from dirt, so I added a coat of polyurethane. Stinky! Hopefully when it dries it will be evenly plastic-ey.
Yay! I'm so excited about this! I put a rug pad under it even though it's on carpet, just to make it even stickier.
