$5 DIY Cow Hide Rug

Soooo how many of you drool every time you see a cow hide rug? I know I do! I've wanted a big beautiful cow hide to mix in with my fun bright colors for as long as I've been able to "dream decorate". Now I want one even more, I mean how perfect would a cow hide blend mine and Reeds style... mmm soo good just thinking about it :)

Basically, you can tell I want one real bad. Sadly we don't have the budget for me to buy a rug just because I want one. And yes I know that SAMs club sells them for about $100 and yes I know most people would consider that cheap but for us if it is over $30 its too much :)  I had to get creative and come up with a way to get the look I wanted without spending the money. 

I figured painters  drop cloth is my favorite thing so why not use it as a rug! All I had to buy was a $5 4x5 painters drop cloth from Lowe's find an image of a cow hide that I liked and copy it! And y'all know me, I didn't just want a normal cow hide rug so I went with my favorite blue that is all over our house. Drop cloth soaks up a LOT of paint so it took about 3 layers for me to get the vibrancy of the color I wanted.

Once I started I realized I didn't really have a place for this beauty. Luckily I still had to figure out my front porch! I knew I wanted it to be a vibrant eclectic mix of new and old. The porch still isn't finished but adding a rug sure did make it feel more of a finished space.

What are some of your favorite drop cloth projects and would you be bold enough to go beyond the typical black and brown cow hide prints? I'm certainly so glad I did!! 

Rit Dye Papasan Cushion

Do y'all remember my post back around Christmas time when I made my own Papasan Chair Cushion (click here to see the full tutorial)? Well with the cold winter weather it basically was used as a massive dog bed for Tepe, which means it got real muddy and covered with paw prints.

So I decided to take it off, wash it, and dye it so maybe the color wouldn't be so obvious. But sadly  my last tutorial didn't include a way to take the cushion off to wash. So I kinda redid a few things. First off, I used Rit liquid dye sunshine orange and followed the directions on the bottle. 

When dying drop cloth be sure to wash it before hand, they can be pretty dirty even right out of the package. It also helps to have your cloth totally wet when adding the dye. Just fill up your washer with warm water and add the dye. I used the entire bottle because I had a large amount of cloth. And I wish I had more because it didn't turn out as vibrant as I was hoping for. But I will just re-dye it the next time I go to wash it :) 

So, ya know that last time I didn't include a way to get the pillows out for washing. So this time I added in snaps along the edge and used them to do a bit of tufting too. I  thought I was going to kill myself trying to figure these out. Thennnnn this beautiful little blue tool snuck in to my life and it was AWESOME! All you do is snap the two pieces in place of the tool and pinch the fabric in between. 

Once you pinch the top and bottom pieces in to the fabric you will be able to use the snaps like normal! So all you gotta do is have enough snaps to leave an opening wide enough to pull out your cushioning when ready for washing :) 

Then all that is left to do is enjoy it! I was staging a photo shoot to get some good shots of the newly dyed cushion but Reed took over and had a little midday nap. I guess thats a good sign :)