More than the sum of its parts

One of the hardest things for me to do is stand in an empty room and visualize the changes that the designer can so easily see in her own mind.

Katherine Stern has a great imagination.   She also is in love with pattern and color. When she presented me with half a dozen fabrics that seemed to bear no relation to each other, I could but have faith in her vision of the master bedroom she was designing.
I'm hesitant to show these now because the room is unfinished, but here we go anyhow.

When the room is complete we will have installed window treatments as well.  But so far our share on this side of the room is the bedskirt, duvet cover, and flanged shams;

on the other side, this round tableskirt, and a topper which I pieced from a too-small remnant that Katherine loved and scraps of the sham fabric to make it big enough.

The most fun part of the project was creating the topper from scraps from the shams.  The look and the process are right up my alley.  How about those mitered corners?  I hated to give this topper to its owner!

Not shown in the picture at top are the feather/down wedge bolsters out of the headboard fabric.  Albany Foam custom-made the feather/down inserts from the template we made. 
I called them the "purple monsters" because stuffing those inserts into the covers was like wrestling an insanely strong, clunky, irrational being.

This week it's all ruffles

My awesome Johnson Ruffler got a total workout this week.  This little machine is one of the best workroom investments I've ever made.

This bedding package has three ruffled products: a bedskirt, inset rouched velvet panels on the duvet cover, and a top-sewn silk ruffle on the pillows.
We did not fabricate the headboard.  Or the dog.

Quite a pile of ruffles!

The velvet was first overlocked, then ruffled on each side.

The rouched strip was applied over the full width of tapestry.  First the lip cord was basted to the tapestry, then the rouching sewn right sides together then flipped to the edge.  The edges were basted together and then the second row of lip cord applied, then the outer band.  This method worked surprisingly easily, especially considering all three fabrics are upholstery weight.

To fill a duvet cover, I lay it wrong side out on the work table, snap the comforter to its corresponding snap tabs in the cover, then work it through the opening, duvet and cover all as one, and zip it up.  It takes awhile but it's easier than stuffing the comforter into the cover right side out and trying to reach inside to fasten the snaps. 

Bedskirt- what can I say?   The ruffler handled the velvet squares with professional calm at 3x fullness.

The silk was sewn into a tube, turned right side out, and pressed with the seam 1" from the edge.  Then it was fed through the ruffler right over that seam line (which is on the wrong side), and again, the ruffler performed like a pro.

The finished ruffle was first basted to the face of the pillow with a narrow strip of double-sided adhesive tape, then topstitched over the ruffling stitch. 

Three of those!

And some sleek throw pillows (no ruffles!) to top it all off.

Another showhouse peek

Packing up goodies today.  The furniture is in place and tomorrow we'll put the bedding in place.

Horizontal stripe for bedskirt; the three-layer trim repeated on throw pillow.