‘Dupe It Yourself’ – Door Mat

I am so excited to start this new blog series called “DIY – Dupe It Yourself” where I recreate things that I want to purchase but can’t justify the price! I have quite a long list of things I am hoping to recreate and I cant wait to take you along. In the future if you’re looking for a specific item that I have “DIY-ed” you can just search “Dupe It Yourself” on my blog and they will all pull up!

My first project is a door mat inspired by this one from Anthropologie (seen below). It sells for $48. I love it so much but could not afford it! I was a little nervous to try this project because I felt like it had the potential to be a total fail, ha! Luckily my aunt and cousin were able to help me and I owe the success of this project to them.

What you’ll need:

1. plain door mat (the one I used is linked below)
2. painters tape
3. craft paint
4. sponges
5. foam brush

BEFORE

First thing we did was used the painters tape to cut out the letters. We made sure to round out the edges. I prefer Frog Tape brand. I find that is sticks better.

Next, we used a foam brush to outline the “tape letters” with white paint. I cut the tip off of it so that it would be more stiff. It worked great! For the “O,” it would have been too difficult to shape it with tape so we cut it out of paper and then held it down with push pins. I made sure to do two coats of this white paint before removing the tape.

Now it was time to cut out the fun shapes! We chose to do four different flower shapes in four different colors. These are the shapes we ended up using. We cut them out of paper first and then out of the sponge.

Then we got to start stamping!! We poured the paint onto paper plates so it was easy to dip the sponges in. It worked best when you got the sponges full of a lot of paint! We also made sure that some of our flowers were going off of the rug, if that makes sense.

After we had filled up the rug with the flower “stamps” we cut some of them in half so that we could put some closer to the letters. We also cut out leaf shapes and filled in with green leaves all in between the flowers. This part was the finishing touch it needed!! I forgot to take a photo of the leaf sponge, sorry!!

DONE

What do you think? I think it turned out great!! Mine cost $20 to make and I think I love it more than the inspo! I only had to pay for the rug since I had the other supplies on hand, and I am pretty sure you can find plain door mats even cheaper than what I paid.

Don’t forget, I hangout on Instagram a lot and you can usually find video tutorials of my projects over there! Follow along @thebloomingnest

See you next time!!