Hello Doormat

Mickey had the idea to stencil a mat for in front of her new front door - she wanted it to say "well hello there" and asked me to help, yay. We found a plain coir mat at Home Depot for 9.99 and I already had stencils and black paint so this was an inexpensive project...note, I didn't say it was a quick easy project though!

Problem started when we used a permanent marker to trace "well" in block letters in the top left corner and then tried to fill it in with paint. Yeah, that didn't work. The material of the mat is rough and too long so it just made a blobby mess, it wasn't crisp and clean like we had envisioned...I had the thought that we could just wash the paint off and start over but since we used the permanent marker to outline the letters that didn't work (fortunately we didn't outline all of the words before realizing it wasn't going to work)!

this is after she washed off the paint in the upper
left hand corner - you can still see the outline though

At that point we had some options (a) scrap the project and chalk up the $10 to an experiment (b) cut off the top that was messed up and just have a narrower rug (c) well there was no c at that time. So she continued decorating the rug by using a big fat sharpie and freehand wrote "hello" at the bottom of the mat figuring if it didn't work she wasn't making it worse and if it did work she'd cut off the top where we messed it up. The hello turned out great! She had to go over it a few times to get it nice and dark.

We then had the idea that maybe we could cut off the outline out of the coir material - it wasn't easy but she ended up getting it out with tiny scissors and tweezers basically pulling the fibers out and cutting other parts of it down. It did remove the outline so we ended up with a plan (c) after all.

plucking and cutting out the outline

Here is it in front of her house, love it!