Rug repairs, and painting a lampshade

The rugs are showing a lot of wear around the edges, and are starting to unravel. I am trying to keep that from spreading.

What I've found works fairly well, with flat-woven rugs, is to take some strong wool yarn and run a line of running stitch or backstitch in about half a inch from the edge.  And then to use each of those stitches as a "base" for several stitches that run around four or five rug threads at the edge, holding them in place.

I think the backstitch looks better, because then the groups of stitches are close together.

One other thing I did in the living room was to paint a lampshade. It is very old, probably around my age, and it showed it. Plus the lamp that it's on is something of a family heirloom; not something that we can stick a new shade on easily.

So I mixed up a batch of paint to match the original color of the shade and painted it. The difficulty was that the shade fabric is relatively coarse, and soaked up a lot of paint--but not evenly. I did what I could with that by being more generous with the paint toward the bottom, so that at least the unevenness would look somewhat deliberate.

In daylight the shade looks about the same as ever, just cleaner. At night with the lamp on, there's a definite difference:  the top portions glow, while the lower portions with a heavier coat of paint don't.