Anthropologie Rosette Duvet Cover - DIY

“Moving around every 3-9 months can make it difficult to feel like you have a home. There's always the family house that you grew up in, but sometimes you just need a taste of that when you are away at school. After years of having a typical college dorm set up, I decided that it was about time I updated my bedroom decor. A graduate school apartment should look more refined than an undergrad dorm, right? After some quick searching online, I came across a variety of lovely intricate textured bedding from Anthropologie. Unfortunately, the price tag, north of $200, was way outside of my budget. For the time being I pushed them to the back of my head labeled in a folder called "someday". “

That was my DD's voice. On one of my visits to see her, she conveyed these thoughts to me during one of our late night conversations. I was curious to see what it was, so she quickly googled the image. 

She asked me if I could recreate it, and I told her that it was simply too ambitious and couldn’t be done. Sadly we attempted to look for cheaper alternatives, but none of them could compare to the original. While searching, we stumbled across a blog where someone had posted their experience doing a DIY of the exact bedding we were interested in! We excitedly read through the part one and part two. Although it appeared to be quite a massive undertaking, we decided right then that we would commit to the project. We made a goal to complete the bedding during the Labor Day weekend.

Luckily, my well-stocked and underused stash contained two Italian flannel bed sheets, which I had bought during a great sale. We decided to use them to create our duvet cover.

Unfortunately, we wanted to create the cover for a full size comforter, and the directions on the DIY tutorial were for a queen size comforter so all the measurements were off. We did some quick math and searching and discovered the standard full size comforter measured 80" x 90". If we made squares of size 15" (originally cut the squares 19" and then the circle in the center reduces the square by 4") with a circular diameter for the rosette of 6" and made 4 pleats per side, we could get pretty close to the right size.

15x15 square with 6 inch diameter center

One complete block

Determining the correct size and creating a template took us 4 hours, after which we spent about 6 hours (two pair of hands) assembling the rosette squares.

Blocks joined to form the first row

Completed top placed on top of full sized comforter

We needed to attach each rosette square to some existing fabric in order to fashion a cover. We picked up two full size bed sheets in a coordinating color and arranged the squares leaving a 2" border all the way around to make up for the missing inches needed to cover the comforter.

Afterwards, attaching our quilt squares to the top sheet took quite a bit of thinking because neither of us are quilters. Because of this, we spent a long time using trial and error to figure out how to attach the quilt top to the top bedsheet without any puckering and preserving our 2’ border all around so that the final cover would be the correct size for the comforter. 10 hours later, we had assembled everything and created ties to close off the open end.

And the final product

And a closeup

In case you were interested in re-creating this yourself, I’ve included a couple of helpful hints that can save you the time we wasted.

• ·        2 Full Size Sheets for the actual cover

• ·        Flannel Bed sheets for quilt top -1 Queen, and most of 1 Full

·        When you attach the flannel to the top sheet,  use a disappearing ink pen to mark the square corners first before attaching. Once you have marked them, match the markings of the corners exactly with each corner of each quilt square (we did this using safety pins). Finally, secure each corner with tie stitches using thick crochet thread and a big needle. The attachment was from the center squares to the periphery.

Ties: 9 used

And the verdict and the most rewarding part of this project - quality time spent with dd!