First World Problem

Ever since I heard that phrase, I feel like my life is just a series of FWPs, which makes it harder to take myself seriously now that I'm not working or volunteering (and I am aware how working and volunteering lets you sew a tapestry of meaningfulness with weak thread--it unravels pretty easily). Now I get all worked up about things that most people wish they had the luxury of thinking about.

The plan for the living room was this: buy not-too-dear wing backs at Ross Auction and cover them with a pretty duck egg & green & brown plaid I found at a fabric store. Order complementary solid-color sofa, paint walls duck egg blue and be done with it. But then David & I found an Edwardian reproduction sofa we liked that came in only six tweeds. We picked a sort of purpley tweed so there went my duck egg blue chairs. While there is purple in it, it also can appear brown. It is quite chameleon-like.

I have been hunting ever since for a fabric that would go well with the tweed without also being too tweedy (I'm working on a formal living room, not a study) and I'm stumped. The choice in upholstery fabrics is very limited here and runs to the modern/contemporary/currently fashionable colour palette (I can't do purple velvet, for instance). I guess you can order traditional fabrics online somewhere, but I need to see and touch things and I'm trying not to spend a fortune.

So today I met with an interior designer from Laura Ashley, where they're having a good sale right now. Choosing the wall colour, the rug and the chair fabric is apparently more than I'm capable of, at least when I'm boxed in by a tweedy sofa. We met for two hours and came up with a plan. A very bold plan. A plan that I felt very good about for about an hour. When she left, I should have buckled down to work on a Queen's deadline. Instead, I drove up to Belfast docks to a fabric outlet several people have mentioned. My rationale for prioritising chair-fabric selection is that I have on temporary loan the sofa tweed fabric. It's due back today. See if you can spot it:

It's in the bottom right corner. The outcome of this trip was to discard the Laura Ashley chair (windowpane blue check on ivory background--see middle of photo) in favour of a Moon fabric (bottom left of photo). Moon is a Yorkshire company that makes the most beautiful plaid woollen fabric. While I was excited about Mrs. Ashley's wall colour and the rug that would go with her scheme, I wasn't loving the chair fabric. But now that I have picked a chair fabric I like, I'm less sure of the wall colour. The rug I liked (on irugs.co.uk) no longer works with the new chair fabric. So I still have loose ends.

I like Persian rugs and the vegetable dyes they use are a certain palette that don't agree that well with the Moon fabric I picked. But having the sofa and the chairs makes me feel better. I can easily pick a wall colour and let the rug decision lie. Lie like a rug. Killing myself here.
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