Our finances are really tight at this point. The economy is awful. My husband's business had slowed down. Our office needed to be very conducive to bringing in money. I read in a fung shui decorating book that an office with 2 doors should have a round rug, preferably blue or black, to keep the energy from flowing in one door and right out the other. Our money had been going out faster than coming in, so I wasn't going to take any chances. Our office would have a round rug with both blue and black!
Before I painted the wood in the office, I taped off a large circle for the rug.
I painted the circle black, for the background. I decided to make the rug look like a braided rug and the "yarn" would be made of a lot of blues. I began painting and up close it looked pretty similar to the braids in a rug. I was feeling smug. Then I stood up to get a better look at the whole thing. It looked like a giant boob. That should have been my first clue that things weren't going to go well.
Ignoring my doubts, I kept plugging along. I added more and more blues and it wasn't looking good. Well maybe I needed more color. I added reds, then yellows and greens. Oh (insert your favorite cuss word here). It was horrible.
I decided that my luck was so bad for the day that I should just go home. We were still living in the old house at this point. We can't move into the new house until the floors are complete, so a setback like this was quite disheartening.
The next day I came back, retaped the circle, and happily painted over the awful rug. I looked at lots of design ideas. Plates are great inspiration for designs that are circular. There were many designs that would have been nicer, but I needed something fast - plaid fit the bill.
In the days that followed, I added lines.I added fringe.
I added a black border to look like a bound edge and it really made a difference. It made the rug seem more 3-dimensional. The photo above does not have that border.
Here's a view of the office rug looking towards the coat room. It's not a great photo, but you can see that I also added black squares to tie it in with the coat room floor.
Even after the redo, this rug is my absolute least favorite faux floor treatment. It's not terrible. People often reach down and touch it to see if it's a real rug. I just know I could have done so much better if time hadn't been an issue.
My next post will show my other faux rug, which, thankfully, turned out much better.