Designer, Christian Dare shares his environmentally friendly zebra skin rug DIY. Follow these few steps to create your own cloth rug, perfect for a simple area rug for your home.

Materials Needed:

• 2 yards of white paper
• Scissors
• 2 yards of upholstery width vinyl (54″ wide)
• 2 water based gold leaf pens
• Lead pencil – the softer the lead the better

STEP 1

Google an image of your favourite zebra skin rug.

STEP 2

Sketch out the outline of one side of your zebra rug on your white paper. You want it to look natural so don’t overthink it. You really only need to do this for one side of the rug because you will be flipping it over to get a mirror image.

STEP 3

Flip your vinyl over wrong side up, lay your paper stencil outline down and trace the zebra outline onto the back of the vinyl.  Flip the stencil over to the opposite side of the vinyl and trace again. You now have a full outline of the whole rug.

STEP 4

Cut out your zebra form. And flip your vinyl back over to the right side.

STEP 5

Now sketch out the lines of your zebra on your white paper stencil. Again, you only have to do the one side.

STEP 6

Now flip over your paper stencil to the other side of the rug. We are going to mirror the stripes this way. You will be able to see your stripes through the white paper. Now carefully trace exactly over the lines. This tracing will force the lead on the other side to leave a mark on the vinyl. It’s like tracing paper without the tracing paper.

STEP 7

Now flip your paper stencil back to the original side of the rug. And repeat the tracing each of the lines. This should create outline of each stripe on both sides of the vinyl.

STEP 8

Now use your gold leaf pens to go over your pencil marks for each of the stripes. You can do all the outlines and fill in later or fill in as you go. Don’t worry one bit about being perfect. Zebra lines should look natural – you can’t screw it up. And remember, if gold isn’t your thing you try any colour of paint marker. Or even swap out your white vinyl for a bright colour.