Citrusy Welcome Mat

Oh, spray paint.  How I continue to love thee!  In a few hours, I was able to take a rather dilapidated sisal welcome mat and spruce it back up to coordinate with my patio redo.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any before pictures.  I know, I know!  Bad blogger.  No cookie.  The mat was once just a plain tan with some autumn leaves sprinkled across it, but after a winter outdoors, it was faded and dirty.  A good hosing off helped the second problem, and after a few days to dry, I went to work with spray paint.

The first thing I did was use a color that was similar to the base color I'd chosen to prime the rug. It seems like this sisal rug wanted to soak up paint, and I wasn't able to find more of the lovely peacock blue Valspar outdoor paint I'd chosen, so I used a lighter mint green as a base.  This gave me some coverage, without wasting all of the color I really wanted to show.  Once the mint green had dried a bit, I sprayed the whole thing with peacock blue.

After a little drying time, I got out one of my Martha Stewart stencils.  I used the medallion shaped one in the right lower corner below, and with a little help from plastic and painters tape, I was able to spray paint a tiled pattern in the contrasting color.

With spray paint & this particular stencil, the edges ended up being fairly blurry, but I'm actually okay with that.  There's a hint of the detail, and that was enough for me!

Not too shabby for an hour's worth of work (if that!).  The most challenging part was making sure I lined up the "tiles," and as you can see, that's not quite perfect.  Again, I can live with it. ;)

I can't quite find the colors/type of spray paint I used online, but Tiffany has a great picture of the colors/can on Living Savvy.

This came out so well, I have been looking for a few other cheap sisal mats to redo, but no luck yet!  

Sharing at:

DIY by Design's Swing into Spring Party

And sort of at Five Days, 5 Ways Feature Friday Free-for-All, because I'm a bonehead and entered my linky submission incorrectly.  Argh.  I just love embarrassing myself.