Custom Rug for AbbeyK, Finally.

My living room rug I hit the first time. I brought home some rugs. I loved one and bought it. Easy-peasy. It's a Persian Gabbeh and like a painting to me. The picture is bad. You have to trust me, it's really great.

The dining room rug, not so easy. I looked. I looked. I took rugs home. I looked some more. I got rug burn carrying in so many rugs. Something was wrong with each one. I have been in love with two Odegard rugs for years: Cloud Oushak and Tiers. Both washed out completely in my house though. Too much natural light, not enough color in the rugs. Custom coloring in Odegard would send me to the "dream land" category of price point. So I kept looking. Then I gave up. I started to think maybe my dining room simply didn't want to have a rug! Not every room NEEDS a rug, afterall.

Finally one day a moth or so ago, Gretchen from Steven King — who what must have been feeling sheer exhaustion from my yapping about rugs – said, Abbey, "Why don't you just design your own rug and we'll make it for you!"

Well, duh! I have no idea why I never considered this. I tell you when it comes to decorating for myself, everything I know flies out the window. I get kinda dumb. But last weekend FINALLY I drew up a rug on graph paper.

I am a quilt-maker. I haven't made a quilt in about 10 years, but it was a hobby for about a decade prior. In quilt-making I worked WITH a grid, but not ON graph paper. My process is to rip up fabric and tape pieces to a wall and then move pieces of fabric around until it feels right. Then sew it all together. This would be considered more of an "art quilt" process than a formal, quiltmaking one. I thought I might have to work up a life-sized sketch of the rug to know for sure, but as soon as I started drawing to scale, I figured out what I wanted pretty quickly. And it just looked right.

I have a mild obsession with all things teal. Have for years. Fabric for the drapes was already picked. The chairs are a few years old. I know I tell my clients to find the rug first, yet another example of me doing everything backwords for myself.

So here's the process.

I took the fabric for the drapes (big leaf) and the fabric on my existing dining room chairs (smaller scale) since it needs to tie together.

I got out the scale ruler, some graph paper, and the beloved Prisma Color pencils. First, I made a few black and white sketches. The circled numbers represent the colors. Color by number. Taupe walls, taupe in the leaf, taupe rectangle #1 in the diagram.

I photocopied the diagram and made different versions using colors I like until it felt balanced. Here are 2 that were finalists – the winner being more teal/bluewith just a hint of green! For an element of surprise and just for fun, I decided to drop a few rows of purple on the ends. Why not!

The one I chose is on the left, but it's a photocopy of the sketch. Gretchen kept the original. Again, you'll have to take my word on the colors. It doesn't represent well.

Last step, I met with Gretchen, and we finalized the selection of the wool poms. Those are the little wool bunches she'll send to production to match. We'll get a strike off, a small sample of carpet. I like to make more than one version. Something can get lost in translation so it saves time in the end to get a few different versions made. And I wrote a check. See, decorating shouldn't be so hard.