A problem-solving adventure

When I began working on these flanged, ruffled, welted shams, I way overestimated my machine's ability to sew through so many layers.

Count the layers: sham front, front lining, sham back; flange front, fusible batting, flange back; self-lined ruffle at 3x fullness; and...... that lip cord. 

Long story short: it was impossible to sew all those layers together.  My only option was to take the lip off of the cord, and hand-sew it after assembling the shams without it.  The problem was that this sort of lip cord cannot be woven back together as some can.  The fill is covered in a woven sheath, and the ribbon and cord are braided around it.

I took apart enough ribbon to make woven "bandaids."  Double-sided tape on a small square of fabric provided the base. 

The three colors of ribbon were woven onto the adhesive, then trimmed and folded into a cover for the loose ends.

It's pretty cool!

The seam was opened enough to slip the bandaid in.

The cord was taped at each end....

Then taped together....

The bandaid was wrapped around the cord and tucked back into the seam, which had to be sewn shut again, by hand, through all the original layers plus the bandaid with its adhesive- thank goodness they were done at that point!

By the way, the pieced pillow in front of the shams: fully lined and serged, and pieced on both sides.

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.