Carpet Picture Stains with More Th>n Insurance

Recent research by MORE TH>N Insurance revealed that 35% of Brits have spilt or knocked food, drinks and other substances onto their carpets while getting over-excited watching sport on TV.

This led to award winning artist Ed Chapman to create some carpet art to celebrate Andy Murray’s Wimbledon victory, using common stains/spills on carpets. e.g. red wine, beer, coffee.

So MORE TH>N insurance came up with a challenge, to create some artwork on a piece of carpet using common household stains.

I’m no artist but I have two young children and I asked them for inspiration as to what to create.  I explained that we could use ketchup that was red and real mud along with make up, wine, soot etc.

They suggested Peppa Pig because her dress is red and she loves jumping in muddy puddles!  What a great idea, so I took their advice and set to work.

I didn’t realise it’d be so hard to draw/paint the design onto the carpet.  The only  stain that went on easily was the coffee which happily mad a big muddy puddle for Peppa Pig to stand on.

So after using the coffee to create a big muddy puddle for Peppa Pig to stand on, we used tomato ketchup to paint her dress, her face is pink emulsion pain, the darker pink is nail varnish, we didn’t buy anything yellow, so later when Mister B had a banana to eat he left his skin strewn across the floor so I picked it up and used it to make the sun.  We always have raisins dotted around our carpet so we used them for some eyes.  We used some orange coloured emulsion for Peppa’s wellies, and attempted some white french polish nail varnish for a white cloud but it was harder to draw on there than first thought.

With some blue and green from a children’s paint pallet we put some sky and grass on the background, then we finished the design with mud – straight from the garden, to give the true effect of jumping in muddy puddles!

My kids loved it!!  Who’d have thought that all those things that usually stain the carpet could be made into a design the children love and want to keep – unfortunately we can’t as it smells a bit and I suspect will go a bit mouldy over the next few days.