$5 floor mat wall art!

In the interest of full disclosure, this art project cost me $5 because I had almost all of the materials I needed but I think even with buying everything, this project would be less than $20 or $30! I have wanted something to go over the fireplace for some time now. But, it's just not a high priority for us right now financially. I came across this tutorial on how to use a floor mat to make wall art some time ago and pinned it. We have this old, iron floor mat that someone left here when they moved. It was all rusty and gross but after a good cleaning, it's quite pretty. I actually have some stained planks, too. However, I didn't think I could use them to make the piece because I *really* don't like using a saw and because we do want to redo our front stairs someday and we might need the pieces.

A few weeks after pinning that tutorial, I was wandering around Hobby Lobby and came across some foam board on sale. A lightbulb went off and I picked two pieces up. Check out the finished product!

There's nothing to it. I pretty much just did what the tutorial people did. I cut the foam board to the size of the iron mat with an xacto knife and then sprayed it with primer. Once that dried, I put the mat on top and sprayed it with a rustoleum hammered finish spray I had in the paint closet. We used it when we moved in to paint our bathroom light fixtures. I really liked the look of the rustoleum because it made the faded mat look fabulous and gave the paint a really nice crackling look on the foam board. There was one problem though:

I really didn't like how stark it was. If I do this again, I will get some kind of beige or sandy spray paint to put over the primer. I wasn't about to start over but all was not lost. I still had some distress ink from Mike's map project. Using the same stamp and smear, I covered the entire thing in the distress ink. Much, much better.

But, even with the starkness taken care of, this is really wide mantel and there just wasn't enough width. Again, I didn't want to have to cut and prime anymore so I threw the newly painted mat up there. I love it. Mike and my mom had some doubts when they saw the first "draft" of this but we all really like it now that it's finished for real this time.

The only thing I might do is figure out how to matte the finish. At this angle, the canned lights reflect more than I like. I did some research and I might have some ideas. If I ever actually do it, I'll let you know what I choose.

As a side note, a friend of mine commented on the sleep fighting post with this video (this was on facebook). Ha!


{Submitted to Skip to My Lou's Made by you Monday!}