Going BOLD. . . and Making it Personal

How do you start planning a room? Where do you seek inspiration?  I often like to find some fabric and jump off from there.  With Signe's room we did have a picture of an inspiration room that got us going, but I knew I would need one fun fabric to plan the rest of the room around.  I was having a hard time finding one for some reason--I think because Signe had picked this raspberry red color that she had set her heart on.  It wasn't really pink, it wasn't really red--but it WAS really hard to find fabrics to coordinate with.

Then I stumbled across this really cool website, Spoonflower.com, that seemed to have endless fun and funky fabrics.  After searching all over the site for well over an hour one night I suddenly realized something. . . you can design your own fabric on Spoonflower.  How cool is that!?  You can draw your pattern and scan it, or design it in photoshop or another design program and upload it.  Then you can choose a scale and repeat pattern, and choose from one of seven kinds of fabric to have it printed on.  This might be sounding like an ad--it's not, I am just all kinds of excited with the idea of making my own fabric patterns.  I think this might be the beginning of a long relationship! 

So I set to work drawing up something.  I didn't think too much about how the pictures looked--I was too excited to order something and see how it turned out.  But none-the-less, I like how it turned out.  Here is my scanned drawing:

and here is a snapshot of the fabric:

I plan to use this fabric as a roman shade on her window.

Once it arrived I made a trip down to Fabric Depot--a HUGE fabric store down in Portland.  And despite the overwhelming amount of options there, I couldn't find any coordinating fabrics that were the perfect shade of raspberry.  I very nearly scratched my fabric and picked a different feature fabric--I had one all picked out.  But Rob (who was nice enough to go with me, despite his aversion to fabric stores), convinced me to stick with my fabric.  So we ditched the raspberry and went with red, which still worked great.  I'm liking it.  Here is a little spread of the general idea I am working with:

What do you think?  

There will be lots of white.  Her duvet cover and one of the two shams I plan to make will be mostly white.  And I have almost decided to paint her current twin headboards white (since Hannah insists on sleeping in Signe's room I have decided to stick with the two twin beds instead of finding a full sized Jenny Lind bed, as I originally planned).

Her dark green dresser and side table, however, may be going turquoise.  Because even though their current green color is very similar to the vine part of the feature fabric, I think we need a little more boldness.  We are taking a departure from the current warm and subtle hues, so we might as well do it BIG, right?