Making a Rug for My Ottoman

Yesterday I showed you my new ottoman I use as a stool in front of my sewing machine.  That color was so punchy that I wished I had a correspondingly lively rug to go with it.  Seems like every time I go to a store I check out their rugs, but I rarely see something that really hits my spot.  

All I'm looking for is a smallish rug, maybe 2' x 4'.  Sometimes I'll throw a quilt on the floor and call it a rug.  This time I decided why not consciously make a quilt rug from the get-go?

This is my idea of a rug!  I knew fairly early on that I was going to use this big floral in the center, along with the borders you see here.  But I wasn't sure what fabrics I wanted to use to build out the rest of the rug.  

So I laid fabric combinations on the floor to audition them (my design wall is filled with another project).  I took pictures of all the options so I could go back and pick the one I liked the best.  Let's look at them, along with my reactions.  You probably have your own opinion on which one you like the best. 

There will be only three fabrics, all in the lower left,  that change in these photographs. 

I like these three very much, but their scale is too similar.

I swapped out the grey on the left.  This grey has a different scale, but I feel like there's too much pink going on.

Orange is nice; this isn't too bad but maybe I can find something I'll like even better. 

I'm not really a stripe person, but let's see if I can make it work.  Hmm, I don't really like it with the orange.

OK, let's get rid of the orange and try that grey squiggle again.  I like it and the green, but I'm still not feeling the stripes.

Maybe if I move the stripe to an inner, narrower border and add a pink fabric.  Now there's not enough contrast in value.

I brought back the dark grey that I started with.  I love grey.  And I love chartreuse, because that's stayed the middle border in all of my options.  No matter how hard I try, I just can't make that stripe work.  I like orange!!  Where's that orange I tried earlier?

Ah, that feels just right.  This is what I'm going with.  Good thing I took all the pictures to make my decision-making process more efficient and logical. 

If you are looking at the photograph closely and notice a little of the grey squiggle fabric above the dark grey, you can ignore it.  When I was throwing the fabric down for auditions, sometimes I just laid new fabrics on top, instead of removing them, because I was lazy.  It won't be part of the finished quilt rug.