Painted Bike Trailer

So I was incredibly fortunate to get a bike trailer for FREE a couple of weeks ago! This is huge because my bike has been out of commission since I was about 7 months pregnant with Deacon and it decided to be winter. After that I had one bike seat and two kids, so my poor bike has been sorely neglected. Now, the trailer was not exactly beautiful or else it would not have been free. So here is what I had to work with:

Faded to almost nothing and a few minor rips. Nothing that duct tape couldn't fix though. Like my little heart patches on the window?

The bar that connects it to the bike was a bit rusty and I was having issues with the purple and yellow together. I'm OCD that way. So I decided the purple had to go and took some sandpaper to it.

My colour and pattern choices were mostly based on how much paint of certain colours I had as well as what colour I was trying to paint over. So I came up with... oranges!

I kind of wish I'd used a darker shade of green for the leaves, my oranges look more like polka dots from a distance. Here's a better look at my amazing painting skills (not! lol!)

I used your basic acrylic craft paint mixed with textile medium since the trailer seems to be nylon. You're supposed to let it sit for a week and then heat set the paint. I think I'll have to take a hairdryer to it very, very carefully. I don't want to cross the line between setting the paint and melting the nylon! You can see on the left where I painted over one of my duct tape patches. We'll have to see how that holds up.

Here is the new and improved (not purple) bar. I'm a little less certain about how this will hold up. I did a few things unconventionally with this part. I didn't use a metal primer because I didn't have any and there is textile medium mixed into the paint. It does have a couple of layers of top coat though, so we'll see. I'll post an update sometime in the future to let you know how the different paint jobs held up, just in case anyone else wants to try it.

Is it silly? Yes, but I figured why not? It's not like I could make it look any worse than it already was! Besides, Guelph is full of hippies, I'll blend right in ;)

P.S. Full disclosure if you plan on trying this yourself; it took FOREVER. I'm talking about an entire afternoon. All of the individual oranges and leaves and going around the edges for the blue...plus everything needed two coats to keep the colours underneath from bleeding through. Solid colours would go much faster if you're just looking to brighten up faded fabric.