{DIY} Upcycled Rug

My living room has a huge wall that's been in desperate need of some art. We've had a decent sized painting on the wall, but the wall sort of just swallowed it up. I've been looking for fun, unique art to add to the wall, since the painting was so lonely. As I was looking for items to add to the wall I had just a couple of criteria: it had to be unique, it had to be funky and it had to relatively inexpensive.

I found this cool woven rug (below) at a used bookstore in town that also sales a bunch of random, vintage items. It was just $12 – in my price range – and I knew I could do something fun with it to create a one-of-a-kind wall hanging.

To turn the rug to a wall hanging, I started by getting it deeply cleaned by Area Rug Cleaning Stuart and sons. Once it was all perfectly cleaned, next was cutting the rug down to make it the right length for the free spot on my wall. Then I folded over the trimmed-down end and hand stitched a small pocket the width of the rug for some sort of hanging rod.

Then came the fun part. I had no idea how I was going to hang the rug. I looked around the house for a rod to hang it, but there was nothing that looked good with both the rug and the rest of the art on the wall. That's when Shelby and I hopped on our bikes and headed out to the desert behind our house. We collected all sorts of cool sticks and brought them home as possible hanging rods.

I tried a few different sticks and settled on one that mirrored the shape of a cow's horns since we have the cow's skull (from Mexico) mounted on same wall. I'm planning on using the extra sticks to make a center piece or an abstract wall hanging.

Here's what the finished product looks like:

And this is what the whole wall looked like with the rug up:

Since taking the last photo, I thrifted another funky piece of art that I hung to the left of the rug. I'm looking for a cool floor lamp to put below the skull. I think once I have the lamp, this wall will be done. Then, I need to shift my focus to finding some fun pieces for my kitchen, which is in desperate need of some funk and fun.

This was such an easy project. I'm pretty sure anyone could do it. A thrifted rug, scissors, needle, embroidery thread or yarn and a stick ... that's all it took to create a one-of-a-kind piece of art. Since I had all the supplies on hand, the whole project cost me just $12 (the cost of the rug) and took less than 30 minutes to complete (searching for the stick was the most time consuming part). I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for more projects like this. Any suggestions on what I could tackle next?