Fun Run(er)

Our dining room has been aggravating me for quite some time.  I like the room in isolation, but unfortunately, it just doesn't fit with the rest of our house.  It's quite orange and bright, while the rest of the house (at least the rooms that are connected to it) are more beachy and blue and green.  The big problem in the room is the art...the centerpiece of the room.  To tone down the room, it would have to go.  But it was a birthday gift from Josh a couple of years ago, per my request at the time, and while I don't think it would hurt his feelings (I did pick it out after all), I do think he would complain about my decorating ADD and the money cost by it!

So, in the meantime, I keep trying to find little things to improve the room and maybe make it  more house-friendly.  And luckily, this runner may have done the trick (at least for a little bit!).

 I've had this idea for a runner for a long time, but I didn't have a blank one to try it out on.  My sister stopped by IKEA a couple of weeks ago, though, and picked one up for me, so it was time to give it a go.  And not only do I love the results, it was pretty much the easiest thing I've ever done!  The only things I needed were some paint (just regular old acrylic), a shaving cream cap (yep, you read that right) and something to line under the runner while stamping it (I used old magazines, but newspaper would have been better).  

you may notice the toothpaste top in that picture as well...
originally I couldn't decide which one to use, but for this project, I liked the bigger circles

To make the runner, all I did was dip the top into the paint, kind of swirling it some to make sure all parts were coated with paint.  And then I just stamped it on to the runner...in no particular order.  Some circles were overlapping, some weren't.  It was crazy, I tell you!

About 5 minutes later, I had filled up the whole runner and our dining room looked much better!  For awhile I have been trying to come up with a different centerpiece for our dining room table, but now with the runner's addition, I'm kind of liking the centerpiece again.