Painted play mat

A few months ago, I was reading apartmenttherapy and came across a post about painting floor mats. You know those ugly playmats that you can buy at home depot, costco, target, garage sales, etc?


 Well someone had painted those and it looked beautiful. I had a collection of those interlocking play-mat squares in the garage, so it was a very minimal investment to try this project. I started by cleaning the mats. Then I painted them with leftover lavender wall paint from the girls' room. I took about a yard of a fabric that I really liked and divided the fabric into 8 sections.

 Each section represented one mat. Then I free handed the print onto each square. Note: Do NOT do this in pen. It's all I could find at the time, so I used one, but I can still see the pen marks through the paint. Then I painted on the pattern with acrylic paint. Once it dried  I covered each square with a polyurethane finish. Here's the finished product.

It looks great, but if you try this at your house, don't walk on it with high heels! I did and poked a bunch of holes in it. So this picture was taken in May and since then it's held up pretty well. This is a very high traffic room and all things considered it still looks good. The polyurethane has yellowed a bit, which makes it so that I can see spots where I missed. I don't know if that's just how polyurethane works, or if I bought the wrong kind. Either way, I consider this project a success.