West Elm Knock-Off Rug

I was set on a black & white rug to set down in the kids’ bathroom. Black & white screams “gender neutral” to me and since I needed all of that I could get in this little bathroom for two girls and a boy, that’s the direction I was headed.

Enter this little thing:
Not black and white (even though it could argue the gender neutral case pretty well) but a great path to getting there since the other side was a blank slate. You probably read the post about this rug and how I sewed, cut, and frayed the edges to get fringe.

Now enter the Torres Kilim from West Elm…aka, my inspiration.
I saw it first on an episode of Fixer Upper and knew it would be super easy to imitate since the lines are perfectly imperfect. Rug. Kids’ bathroom. Now.

Well, here’s my smaller scale, ten-minute version:

And, of course, here’s how I got from white to West Elm and how you can too. :)

First, here’s the rug untouched on the underside. It’s just a flatweave, cotton (I think?) rug with very little texture, making it a perfect canvas:

Using some black acrylic paint that I added water to (about 1:2 ratio, paint to H20) and a 3/4” wide paintbrush, I painted several lines down the width of the rug.
I started in the middle of the rug, brushing one line down that mark. Because I was going for imperfect, I didn’t tape anything off. But, I did stretch out a tape measure that I painted alongside so that I had some sort of guide on painting a semi-straight line. (But, let me say this, even the tape measure wasn’t necessary. If you look at the West Elm rug, their lines are all over the place; sorta curvy and jagged, not straight. This rug is something a four-year old can copy.)
(What’s funny is that, looking at the rug in the above picture, I can totally tell my line was a smidge crooked. But hey, c’est la vie, right? The more imperfect, the better.)

To figure out where the next line was going, I stretched my fingers out in true Hawaiian form and whoop, there it went. I told you, imperfect was the name of the paint-game. :D

Once I had the line I was working on painted all the way across, I went back and brushed down it with my brush angled with the line to create some striations like so:

If watching helps, I made a Instavid you can watch HERE.

Next, those imperfect zig zags. They’re just freehanded…everybody can freehand these, pinky swear.

I did two sections of diamonds and four sections of zig zags and called it done. Ten minutes. How I wish all of our projects were so quick and simple.