DIY Door Mat - Kristen’s Modern Life

Sometimes on the weekends, my family naps all at once and I get a little quiet time to myself. Usually that means cleaning or laundry for me, but this weekend I decided to do a little DIY project I had been wanting to try. It didn’t go quite as planned and I would definitely do a few things different next time, but I still love how it turned out!

The supplies I started with:
-Paint brush
(a smaller size would have worked better for precision)
-Outdoor black acrylic paint
-Push pins
(I recommend using thin needle pins instead of the circle style)

I got this plain mat from Target for $10. Ikea has them for about the same price, but their mats are a bigger size, which I like even more.

Shout out to my husband who used Cricut design space to make my stencils. After the stencils were cut out, I used the push pins to keep them in place. The toughest part of this step was placing the little pieces inside letters like “R”, “A”, “O”, “B”. Also, I’m pretty sure “BABYSITTER” is one word.. oops! No turning back now.

Next, I dipped the paintbrush into the black acrylic paint and gently pushed down into the stencil. This step was very tedious and needed to be done 3 times. To be honest, I just didn’t have that kind of time on my hands and I’m not really sure if I will for the next 18 years. Not to mention, every time I lifted the brush away from the stencil, the paper lifted with it. This meant I had to very carefully put it back in place and secure with the pins again. No fun. I got to the “P” in “Pizza” before I resorted to another idea.

I went searching through our garage for black spray paint and of course, my handy husband had a full can! Yesss. Here we go. Let’s get this thing done!

Spray paint turned out to be much faster as I’d hoped, but it did have it’s downfalls. There was a little bit of overspray on the outside of the stencils. Also, I think multiple layers of the acrylic paint would last longer. A solution to most of the issues I had would be to iron on one big piece of freezer paper for the stencil. No push pins and no overspray. (next time, y’all!)