Everything in our bedroom revolves around the gorgeous, purple brocade, quilted comforter cover we use as a canopy over our bed. We bought it in India, and it's unbelievably rich and dramatic. The main color is royal purple with tons of gold embroidery and hints of turquoise and salmon pink. This is the last thing we see before going to sleep and the first thing we see upon waking up. IMO, it's the best money we've ever spent and totally worth the hassle of lugging it around the northern subcontinent (it's huge and heavy, and we bought it early in the trip!).

The bed has a black velvet comforter cover and black satin dust ruffle. We have sheet sets in black, charcoal grey, and tone-on-tone dusty purple stripe. These all helped dictate the room's color scheme.

In the week after we bought the house (before we'd moved furniture in), my mom and I painted the bedroom walls dark purple and the ceiling light purple. Again, the walls needed two coats. I painted the window and door trim in a purple a little brighter than the walls. Mom and I used the same purple to sponge-paint a crennelated arch border that I drew based on the arch graphic at the top of our India web site. I made that graphic from this picture of the Taj.

Paint chips, truest colors (esp. on a Mac).

Arch border on walls, lights under canopy (purple walls are not that neon in real life!
the shade is a royal purple with a darker purple for the trim and sponge painting).

Things to Come:
Where the walls meet the ceiling, I'm going to glue fabric trims, starting with a deep purple braid. This will cover the seam and give it a 'finished' look. I hope to find a couple different types of vaguely Indian trims in purples, gold, and black, and glue them below the braid as I find them.

At the tips within the arch, I'll glue small mirrors, like the shisha mirrors on Indian clothes and belly dance costumes. This is reminiscent of the Hall of Mirrors in Jaipur. I'll also glue small fake jewels in purple, blue, and turquoise at the mirror points for more glamor and to bring out the colors in the bed canopy. I want to scatter the room with candles, perhaps even wall sconces, so the flickering light will be reflected by the mirrors and jewels.

Not sure what to do about the furniture in the room. We have four dressers in various shades of wood and fake wood and even one unfinished. That's the easiest, of course -- stain or paint it. But my largest dresser is cheap laminate wood, which I can't paint, and I can't afford to replace it right now. At the very least, I'd like to get some purple and silver sari fabric and drape it over all the dressers so they have a unified look.

I use an old, white laminate desk as a dressing table, and it's currently topped with a brilliant peacock blue and turquoise scarf (another find from the India trip). I really should cover the rest of it with the black marble contact paper I have and attach the black iron, curlique drawer pulls too. That project's a whole year late!

The final touch will be the framed art. We've picked out a bunch of our India photos that we'll enlarge and put in really nice mats and frames. Most of the pictures are closeups of the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho, India. My good ol' analog camera actually got better shots of these than the digital camera because the zoom lens is more powerful. There's quite a few closeups of Krishna cavorting with lushly rounded women, usually several at once. Oh yeah, we love our artsy, historical porn!