It’s always a feeling of accomplishment to get past the preparatory stages of painting a floorcloth and actually START painting the floorcloth! This latest step involved painting the marble texture on the background diamonds. Before the whole pattern was laid out, we painted the entire front in Monterey White (off white). To create the marbled look, I painted a runny concoction of Monterey White mixed with paint conditioner and water over the diamond areas.

Next, using a similarly mixed marble paint in Richmond Gold and a small round brush, I squiggled vein-like marks over the diamond. Dropping wet paint into wet paint causes the marble effect to happen. The paint bleeds out into the other areas. It doesn’t matter if it goes over the lines, all the other areas will be painted again anyway. I try to keep this loose, but also keep the same diagonal direction of marble veins from one end of the floorcloth to the other.

Here’s another shot, showing the diamond (and others around it) finished. Now I let the whole thing dry overnight, and then we can start painting one side of the tumbling blocks.

After ten and a half hours of calculating, measuring, head-scratching, cursing and more measuring, I have finally completed the layout of the Carlyle House floorcloth. The tricky part of this process is that there are no continuous straight lines in this design, so each row of “blocks” is dependent on the one before it. And on a piece such as this being nearly 12 feet wide, if the measuring goes off by as little as a sixteenth of an inch on one side, it can be off by inches on the other. Not a pretty sight! (Scroll down a couple of posts to see the design.)

I use a laser light to produce a line square to the edge of the floorcloth which ensures that the blocks stay true to the pattern. I move the laser light with each successive row (14 rows in all on this design). A card stock template helps to prevent measuring errors. Every angle on this design is either 90 or 45 degrees, so those are easily checked with a plastic square.

Even with all of these tools and careful measuring, mistakes are still made. Unfortunately, it’s hard to detect them until you’ve gone far enough to disturb the pattern. That means erasing an entire row (half an hour of work) before correcting the error and moving forward again.

I don’t know if you can see the lines drawn in this photo. Click on the photo to see a closeup. I do the lines quite lightly so that they are easily erased, if need be, and so they won’t be visible on the final floorcloth. The next step will be marblizing the diamonds. Stay tuned.

There have been several requests for a class covering how to layout this design. It really is a difficult process, and what I’ll do is offer it as an “Advanced” online class. In order to take it, participants will be required to take an Intro “Laying out a Geometric Floorcloth” online class. Look for details about the Intro class later this week.

The next preparatory steps for the Carlyle House Tumbling Blocks floorcloth were completed this week at the studio. First, the back hem was painted. Since the outside edge of the design is black, I painted the hem black as well. To prevent getting paint on the unpainted back of the floorcloth I slid a piece of card stock under the edge of the canvas. This way I  painted right over the cut edge, locking the fabric and preventing fraying, and I still avoided getting paint on the raw canvas. I slid the card along as I painted, going all the way around the perimeter of the floorcloth.

When the hem was done it looked like this:

After the black paint was completely dry, we carefully flipped the whole floorcloth over. Using a 4″ wide brush, Theresa painted the entire pre-primed front side in Monterey White. We do that by rolling the whole floorcloth up and unrolling 2 feet at a time to paint. This means we don’t have to get up on the table. We just paint what is immediately in front of us and unroll as we are ready for a new section. We work quickly, so that one section doesn’t dry before we paint the next section. Overlaps are very visible if drying happens between layers. We always paint the entire surface in one session, so that the finished surface is uniformly coated.

Here it is all painted. It’s a little bumpy in this photo because it’s still a little damp. It flattened completely as it dried.

This weekend I will crunch some numbers and put my geometry skills to work as I prepare to layout the Tumbling Blocks design. Check back here next week for another progress report.

Big news! We are offering a special Memorial Day Floorcloth Kit for the do-it-yourselfers. Click here for details about that. It’s a beautiful flag-inspired design that is easy enough for beginners and the whole kit is only $30!

Please comment below if there is any specific floorcloth information you’d like to have included in upcoming posts. I’m always looking for new topics and it helps me to know what you like to read about!

Last week I started working on a floorcloth for the study in the historic Carlyle House in Alexandria, VA. The Carlyle House was completed in 1753 by British merchant John Carlyle for his bride, Sarah Fairfax of Belvoir, member of one of the most prestigious families in colonial Virginia. Their home quickly became a center of social and political life in Alexandria and gained a foothold in history when British General Braddock made the mansion his headquarters in 1755. Braddock summoned five colonial governors to meet there to plan the early campaigns of the French and Indian War. On the National Register of Historic Places, Carlyle House is architecturally unique in Alexandria as the only stone, 18th-century Palladian-style house.

There are already several floorcloths in use in the museum, so it is a great place to visit if floorcloths are of interest to you!

The design the curator has chosen is based on the floorcloth shown in a painting from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum in Williamsburg. It is a tumbling blocks pattern, from John Carwitham’s collection of designs for floors published in 1739. I have painted several floorcloths using this pattern. It’s very tricky to layout, but the final effect is very stunning.

To make it even more complicated, the room is ‘L’ shaped and the overall dimension makes it larger than one piece of canvas, so I’ve had to splice the canvas together. Last week we shrank enough canvas for the two pieces which were to be spliced together. When they were dry, primer was applied and they were cut to two pieces and carefully spliced.

Here are the two shrunk and primed pieces waiting to be spliced. After splicing , I carefully measured the entire floorcloth, allowing for the hem. The next step was to cut all the way around (after measuring one more time, just to be sure). The corners were sewn and turned and the entire hem was pressed flat, then sewn. It was very tricky getting the ‘L’ shape through the sewing machine. We roll all but the side we’re sewing and guide it through the machine. The ‘L’ creates a whole new dimension of sewing problems.

Here it is, all sewn and ready for paint! This is the backside.

I’m planning to try to post photos of my progress on this project. The easiest way for me to do that is on my Facebook page. So if you’re interested, please “like” the Canvasworks page and you’ll get notices whenever I post something about this floorcloth. Go ahead and ask questions too. I’m happy to show you how I create a piece like this.