I printed the stencil in an A3 sized sheet of paper (that’s like twice the size of a normal sheet of paper). The drawing itself is 1foot x 1 foot, since the rug is 5′x7′ it fits perfectly. The paper was cardboard like but nothing too special – I printed it several times just in case it fell apart mid project but I only ended up using one of them. (Mainly because I was too lazy to cut out more of them). The paint holds out great – I’ve washed the rug a couple of times because it’s in a high traffic area and it turned out okay. A friend even spilled a full glass of wine and now you can’t even tell. Although after washing it three or four times it started to fade a little. That didn’t bother me at all, (I kind of liked the look that way instead of such a stark contrast between green and white) but my boyfriend preferred it whiter so I ended up going over it with a paintbrush once again (it was water-based paint, so it probably wasn’t recommended to wash it, but it holds out fine). I’ve only done that once though, and we’ve had it for more than 2 years.

So if you have paint for fabric/rugs in the US (which you probably do, there’s just no such a thing here in Spain, at least not readily available) I’d definitely recommend it. And as to why it didn’t bleed, well, it’s partly because of the rug, and I used very little paint on each stroke. Also I kind of freehanded it sometimes even with the stencil in place. You might think it’ll look bad but in the end it doesn’t.

Sorry it got so long, but I hope that helps!