Instructions

Creating the Stencil File

When you open up Cricut Design Space, the first thing you're going to want to do is choose an image for your stencil for your DIY patio project. And there are a lot of them! There's a whole grouping of stencils that work well here in Design Space.

What you're looking for is a repeatable pattern, and one that doesn't have a lot of pieces that connect. Why? Because you'll end up with giant holes instead of nice details. If you question whether or not a design will work, give it a cut on a piece of cardstock first before you use up a piece of acetate.

Sizing the Stencil image

Before you decide how big the image needs to be, you're going to have to a bit of math. Determine how large your DIY patio rug needs to be. Mine was about 6x8. Your maximum stencil size based on the size of the cutting mat is 11.5 inches. But unless you're painting a giant rug, you'll probably want something smaller; 8-8.5" is a good size. Determine how many you can fit exactly along the length and width of your floor and adjust the image size appropriately. Or adjust the size of your rug. If this doesn't end up working out cleanly in the end, don't worry, you can do some things to make it work visually.

Prepping the Sticky Mat for Cutting

I have maybe one new and fully sticky mat at any given time. By the time I was almost done with this project, I finally found one. Which means I had to figure out how to get the acetate to stay completely still while cutting. The trick was using the big scraper to firmly press the plastic to the sticky mat. There's a roller that Cricut makes that would probably work, too, but the scraper I think applied a little more pressure to make a firm adhesion. And after you've peeled up your cut, the scraper is super helpful getting all the stuck acetate off the mat.

Cutting the Stencil

I tried both the fine point blade and the deep cut blade with this material, and i found that the deep cut blade gave more consistent results. I didn't have to spend a lot of time separating the pieces of the cut further using the deep cut blade, which is always a bonus.

Two stencils minimum should be cut for a border rug like the one in these project photos. Things went a bit faster when I had six stencils to tape down in a row, but do what works for you!

Prepping the floor

As with any painting project, you're going to have to suffer a little bit of prep work before you actually start painting. It was delightful to have an excuse to ask my family members to pressure wash the back porch for me before I started, haha. Point is, make sure your surface is really clean before you paint. Any little bits of dirt will make the paint flake off quickly if not cleaned up.

Measuring and taping

We're going to liberally use some painter's tape to make this rug! Measure and tape down the outside area of your rug. Be sure to firmly seal the tape to the floor so no seepage occurs.

Paint the base color of your DIY rug. I painted what I thought was going to be navy blue, but it was not really what I wanted, so I later went back and painted my navy as originally intended.

After the first layer of paint dries, throw down two of your stencils to for guidelines and tape down the inside border of your rug.

Paint the base color of your border.

Painting the stencil

Now for the fun part! Painting your stencil!

You're going to be tempted to use a regular paintbrush for this...but don't. Go to the craft store or Amazon yourself some stencil brushes for this. They are round with a fat swath of bristles. We won't be doing brush strokes, and dabbing instead so the stencil brushes are much more handy.

Start in the corners and work inward with the stencils. Use painter's tape to lightly tape several stencils in a row when making the border of this DIY patio rug. This is so you can get a good transfer of the shapes that are made where the stencils meet.

DIPPING THE STENCIL BRUSH: Put a tiny tiny amount of paint on the end of the brush. Like barely any. Use too much paint and it will leak underneath the stencil and make a messy transfer.

Like this. This was one of the first panels I painted and I was reaquainting myself with stencils. Lesson learned! Light paint on the brush.

APPLYING PAINT WITH THE STENCIL BRUSH: Hold the brush 100% vertically when applying paint. In a dabbing motion, paint the inside of the stencil. Yes, it's time consuming, but you'll get a clean transfer this way. Tiny amount of paint, dabbing motion. NO BRUSHSTROKES. You'll end up with globby shapes.

You can lift up the stencils at any point after you paint them to use again. I did find that I ended up with light colored paint in places I didn't want because there was still wet paint on the stencil. With a light coating, it doesn't take the paint that long to dry, so if you find smearing of paint is an issue for you, you may want to wait a few minutes between stencils.

When I finished a row of stencils, I always left the last in the line taped down so I could get a nice shape when I taped down the next row.