DIY Geek Rug – Outdoor Geek Spaces

Want to geek up your outdoor space? Yeah, us too. So we made a DIY geek rug (for indoors or out) with one of our favorite Lord of the Rings quotes. 

All backyards need more Tolkien. And more geek stuff in general, right? We’ve done a couple of painted rugs now (our Doctor Who Tom Baker scarf rug, and our Legend of Zelda and Star Trek geek welcome mats), but this time we wanted to make a much larger custom geeky area rug, specifically for our outdoor space.

This is done in pretty much the same way we made the Tom Baker scarf rug, but instead of using painters tape, we used chalk to freehand our favorite Tolkien quote onto a cheap, plain outdoor utility rug. Like this one. The writing is a mix of our two handwriting styles (one of us writes in caps, the other cursive), to make it feel more personalized. You can see in the photo below that we drew a bit of a grid onto the rug first, with chalk, so that our letters would be somewhat straight.

Side note: If you’re looking for other nerd quotes (especially geeky love quotes), we have a big list going, here!

This guy came along to “help”. Our other pup did as well, seen on our Instagram when we teased this project a couple of weeks ago.

Here’s the full poem, by the way. From one of our oldest, most dog-eared copies of The Fellowship of the Ring (we probably have too many):

After we drew the sentence on the rug with chalk, we painted right over the chalk lines with acrylic paint splashed with a liiiiitle bit of textile medium. Not sure if that was necessary or not, but we had some on hand so went with it. The paint we used specifically said it would work outdoors, which we’re hoping means it has some sort of fade-resistant qualities. Time will tell, but regardless we tried to pick colors that would look okay worn & faded (mostly gold and green, which felt Lord-of-the-Rings-y).

After the words were painted with two coats, it looked a little bare so we sketched out a quick pattern on the upper and lower borders. Then painted that in as well. Measuring tape came in really handy for this, to draw the lines straight.

And that was it! Took a couple of hours total, including dry time. If you’re looking for other geeky outdoor things, we have tutorials for Doctor Who stepping stones, a DIY Mario Piranha Plant, and geeky welcome mats.

What do you think? Do you have any fun geeky outdoor accessories or projects you’re working on?