Embroidered Shade

The projects that have been sucking the majority of my time lately have mostly been in Randa's room. She and Kenzi have traded rooms and she's been wanting to paint over Spongebob for quite some time.

After she decided that she wanted blues and greens, I just happened to find this sheet at the thrift store.



Since Randa loved it as much as I did, we decided to use it as the main inspiration for her room, both the colors and the design.

Now might be a good time to mention that I have a bit of an addiction to thrifted sheets. There are so many fantastic ones out there that every day I don't go to the thrift store, I feel like I'm missing out. I use them just like regular fabric (after a really hot wash in the machine) and I love them. My only advice is to not get the jersey sheets unless you really know what you're doing; they're a bitch to work with.

To make the curtain, I used two other sheets, both of them white. One of them had some nice stripes, the other was just used as a liner.



I'd originally planned to embroider it with some of Randa's artwork from when she was little, but she came up with this idea that I also loved. Basically, she traced a few of the flowers from the inspiration sheet onto a piece of paper (using a lightbox). Then I used that as a pattern for the embroidery. I just used a chain stitch in matching colors of floss.



I've never really done much embroidery, so this was a bit of a stretch for me. There is one spot where the tension got a bit wonky, but overall, I'm really pleased with how it came out.



This shade is only like one of the 4 or 5 projects for this room redecoration (one of which is the carpet removal). But I thought I'd spread them out instead of creating one ginormous post.

For those of you who are interested, here's the detailed explanation of how to string up this bad boy.