Create beautiful art underfoot for any room in your house.

You're tired of staring at bare hardwood floors, but the Oriental rug you covet is prohibitively expensive. The solution? A floorcloth that you can make yourself for a fraction of the cost of an area rug or carpet. Floorcloths -hand-painted durable canvas rugs -have become popular again because of a renewed interest in Early American decorating techniques. Filled with essential techniques and sensational color variations this book is the most comprehensive, easy-to-follow guide to creating beautiful paint-based rugs for your home. It provides basic how-to instruction on every material, tool, and technique. An introduction to color palettes and pattern development makes this a useful guide for a beginner as well as a valued resource for any craftsperson.

Learn how to create canvas rugs for decorative home use. Lisa Curry Mair will show you how to create beautiful art underfoot for any room in your house. Floorcloth Magic offers complete instruction for selecting materials and tools, easy-to-follow directions for mastering basic techniques, and guidelines for using decorative effects such as sponging, marbling, stencilling and ragging. She will have several samples of her work showing the process in various stages. Let Lisa bring out the artist in you!

Personalized & signed by the author: $20.00 US

Floorcloth Magic
How to Paint Canvas Rugs for Decorative Home Use
by Lisa Curry Mair
ISBN 1-58017-405-1
144 pages; 8 7/8" x 9; Full-color photographs and illustrations thoughout; Paperback with French flaps.

From inside front flap:
You're tired of staring at bare hardwood floors, but the cost of carpeting makes you cringe. You're fed up with endless vacuuming. You'd like to turn your creative energies to home décor. What to do? Make floorcloths! These hand-painted durable canvas rugs were popular for centuries before the invention of linoleum and are experiencing a renaissance because they are beautiful, easy to clean, and non-allergenic. Moreover, they can be customized to fit the exact dimensions, color scheme, and style of any room in your home.
Virtually indestructible, completely kid- and pet-proof, and easy to clean with a mop and water - no wonder George Washington brought a beloved floorcloth to the White House (and took it away again at the end of his last term). A floorcloth is the perfect way to cover a bare floor and leave your personal artistic mark.

From back cover:
FLOORCLOTH MAGIC offers complete instruction for selecting floorcloth materials and tools; easy-to-follow directions for mastering basic techniques; and guidelines for using decorative paint effects, including sponging, stamping, marbling, stenciling, and ragging. You will learn how to select color combinations and develop your own patterns. You'll also find inspiration for creating designs to fit every decorating style - from country to contemporary - in a gallery of full-color photos of works from a broad range of floorcloth artists.

For a personally signed copy of Floorcloth Magic, email us at canvasworks@adelphia.net , or send $30.00 (includes shipping) to:

Canvasworks
326 Henry Gould Rd.
Perkinsville, VT 05151

Reviews

"Lisa Curry Mair brings readers, crafters, and decorators a book about floorcloth. Now, before you move on, thinking: "oh another how-to craft book," let me first say this isn't a craft as much as an art, and if you aren't the crafty type, then once you gaze through this book you will most likely hunt down someone who is and have one made. A floorcoth is a heavyweight cotton canvas with latex paint colors and a couple coats of polyurethane sealer. Our ancestors used worn sails from ships. The author tells us that floorcloths were a regular part of our American ancestors' households, created to remind them of the home they left across the seas. The cloths also had other uses, such as crumb catchers protecting existing carpets; they reduced drafts on wide-board floors, and replaced wool and rag rugs during the summer months because they were cool underfoot. The 1809 White House had one; so did the governor of Massachusetts in the early 1700s. In 1739, John Carwitham, an engraver in England, made 24 plates of designs for floorcloths and other floor decorations. It's an old and useful art.
The book starts with the history of floor cloths then moves into creating of them. First with the tens steps of preparing the canvas, decorating it and sealing it. She generously gives ideas and examples of patterns and borders, discusses combining colors, painting techniques and presents a gallery of floorcloths, which gained plenty of reaction in my house when I showed them around -- my favorites being Alan Vaughn's Circular CDR with Spokes and Pamela Marwede's Lily Pond. I found the book to be solid and generous in its instructions and ideas. A floorcloth would make a wonderful addition to any house, in any room. Floorcloth Magic truly is a wonderful addition to crafters and artist library. It's the kind of book that has to be shared. I heartily recommend it."

Reviewed by: Brenda Weeaks, MyShelf.Com
© MyShelf.Com. All Rights Reserved

http://www.myshelf.com/howto/02/floorclothmagic.htm

"Before the invention of linoleum, berber, saxony or shag, canvas rugs were used to decorate floors. Our ancestors were on to something! Besides their decorative advantage, floorcloths are easy to keep clean, fun to decorate, and are incredibly durable. You can sweep, vacuum and scrub them with disinfectants. They are perfect for those who have allergies to dust and carpet fibers. More than floorcloths, these beauties should be named "Floor Art".
Floorcloths can be painted in ANY style: an intricate Persian design, a fun rug for a child's room, an early American quilt design, or ultra contemporary simplicity. You can make them any size, and any shape, and paint them to match your wallpaper or fabric… in fact, if you are "artistically challenged", you can incorporate wallpaper and fabric pieces to the floorcloth for a perfect "match". Your floor art will be unique to your home and your lifestyle.
Best of all floorcloths are easy to make:
1. Prepare the canvas
2. Paint the floorcloth
3. Seal the finished piece
Sounds simple, and it is. But, depending on the complexity your design, this project is not one to be finished in a day.
In her book, FLOORCLOTH MAGIC, Lisa Curry Mair has compiled an encyclopedia of floorcloths, beginning with the history and practicality of floorcloths followed by detailed instructions for making your own. The instructions are easy to follow, with photographs provided for each step in the process.
So... you read the first few chapters and she's convinced you that YOU can make a floorcloth. Now, you have a big, blank canvas staring at you. How are you going to decorate it? The author gives you sixty pages of patterns, designs and inspiration. She discusses designing on the computer, using quilts as inspiration, designing and making your own stencils and stamps, and how to enlarge your design. She then discusses color selection, and various techniques for applying paint, including freehand design, color washes, sponging, ragging, marbling, dragging and distressing.
Great inspiration for ideas, the next thirty-four pages is a gallery of floorcloths by various artists. These beautiful, and beautifully photographed, floorcloths range from a rug that appears to be a pool of large goldfish swimming on the floor, to a Miro inspired contemporary design, to a giant Monarch butterfly, actually cut to the shape of the butterfly.
Make a floorcloth? Yes, you can!"

© Cindy Cloyd for CreatingHomeDecor.com, 2002

http://www.creatinghomedecor.com/brfloorclothmagic.htm

326 Henry Gould Rd
Perkinsville, VT 05151

802•263•5410

E-mail us!