My roller derby bedroom

I've been promising to blog about my roller derby bedroom for months.  Here it finally is.  

The Inspiration

My roller derby team had been discussing bout programs and poster art for a long time.  I like to scrapbook (READ: I collect lots of ticket stubs and pretty paper and let them gather dust in my craft stash), and had been meaning to create a derby scrapbook for my husband and I.  I had tons of old programs hiding in the bottom of my stash, and pulled them out.  The more I looked at them, the more I realized that these really are awesome pieces of contemporary art.  They deserved to be hung up, not packed away in the bottom of a closet.  So I went to Target, bought some cheap frames, and turned them into the art they deserved to be.  Unfortunately, they just didn't seem to fit with the flowery comforter that we currently had in our bedroom, so I decided to completely redecorate.  Being me, I of course had to do it from scratch.  

The Quilt

The quilt was inspired by a pattern in 3-fabric quilts, Quick Techniques for Simple Projects by Leni Levenson Wiener.  All of the fabric is from JoAnn.  I was initially going to go with a black, white, and yellow color scheme, but when I found this beautiful bright orange subtle-flowered calico I knew I just had to have it.  I thought the near-neon would really brighten up the the cement gray of our bedroom walls, and of course it's PRG colors.  I found the hounds tooth and old victorian gray prints and fell in love.  The quilt is made of 90 offset T blocks, rotated so the cross pieces touch and then offset every other row to make the diagonal plus signs.  I carried the off-centered orange stripe into the pillows.   It took me about a month to finish the quilt and pillow cases.  I also plan on making some big orange euro-sized pillow shams since we don't have a headboard, but that's a future project.  Some day, I'll also applique a roller skate on a throw pillow, but I've got about ten other projects waiting in the wings before I get to that one.

The Vinyl
Special thanks goes out to Neil at beepart for the fantastic custom roller derby pin up girl.  Neil was great to work with and seemed really excited to do the custom roller girl vinyl.  I just love her.  I'd actually found the vinyl before going quilt fabric shopping, and she's what inspired the choice of retro fabric patterns.  Well, she and the Edwardian-style IKEA furniture that we had.  


The Accents

Our bedroom gets a ton of light in the morning, but later in the day it becomes a bit of a cave.  To combat the dark, dark, dark of it all, I found as many mirrored accent pieces as possible.  We already had the mirrored lamp bases, and I hung up 9 4" square mirrors above the large dresser.  The additional mirror on top of Carl's tall dresser also helps to reflect light from the hallway back into the room.  Finally, I found the fantastic mirrored retro-style floor lamp.  I think the end result is a room that's modern but cozy, with great pops of trendy color anchored by classic styles.  I'm really happy with the way it turned out.