It’s difficult to put all these duvet cover niggles into the best order –
they are all fairly irritating!
And it was these issues that led me to design what I consider to be the
‘best duvet cover ever’!
So please do read on, I am sure that many of you will find that you share these ‘niggles’:
Washing the duvet cover
Don’t you just hate your pillow cases ending up inside your duvet cover as you remove it from the washing machine?
That drives me mad!
And then after you’ve removed them, along with the ball that contained the washing liquid, and whatever else ended up inside there, you find that it’s inside out! Aaarrgh!
If you have buttons on the bottom of your cover I guess you could button it up before putting it in and then unbutton it afterwards but isn’t it enough having to button it up once you’ve managed to wrestle your duvet into it?
But then if you have poppers I doubt they’d stay fastened during the wash.
With the CIY ‘best duvet cover ever’ NONE of this is an issue.
Putting the cover onto the duvet
Who loves this job?
I don’t.
So I’ve designed this cover to be super easy to put on.
Easier than any others I have found available anywhere, and trust me I most certainly searched!
Horrid creases all over the cover
Do you enjoy looking at a cover full of creases on your bed?
I hate it.
But then would you stand and iron a duvet for a double bed yet alone a king size one?
No!
Neither would I.
So I have dealt with that in my design for the best duvet cover too!
Yes really! I have!
The miraculous growing cover
Okay so you’ve battled with getting your cover off and then in and out of the washing machine and then managed to get your duvet back into it, which hardly any of us do as often as we would like because of all the hassles involved.
You’re prepared to put up with the creases because life is just too short to be ironing the damn thing too!
PHEW!
And now you are in bed, relaxing, and happy with your freshly laundered bed linen.
Wonderful.
Sweet dreams.
But then you go to grab the duvet to pull it up closer around your shoulders but find that all you have in your hand is the cover and NOT the duvet!
Frustrating or what?
That was one of my biggest ‘niggles’!
That the cover designed to fit your duvet somehow seems to manage to grow a couple of sizes too big!
With the CIY ‘best duvet cover’ design this just won’t happen.
Your duvet really will stay perfectly in place within the cover until you’re ready to remove it.
Getting too hot or too cold
Temperature is important when it comes to getting a decent night’s sleep and maybe even more so if you are a woman of my age!
The ‘all season’ duvet covers help with this but it’s not perfect.
And what if you like a different temperature to your partner?
I have also taken that a step further in order to give you the best possible chances of the perfect nights rest, especially if you have a large super king bed.
Because my duvet cover is so easy to wash and put on, I made up a second, more plain cover for the part with the lower tog rating, which we place over the top of the main duvet if we feel we may need it.
This way, with them separate, if either of us gets too hot we just move our side of the top cover into the middle of the bed!
During the day you can either leave the top cover folded neatly on top or lay it under the more decorative cover.
And what fabric do you want your cover made from?
I like 100% cotton.
And not just any old 100% cotton but lovely luxurious thick fabric made from Egyptian long staple cotton with a very high thread count.
To buy a set of bed linen made from such fabric, you need to take out a mortgage!
But with the CIY ‘best duvet cover’ YOU are in control as you will be making it up yourself from my pattern, so YOU choose the fabric you want to use and it doesn’t need to be nearly as expensive as you may imagine!
And then there’s the aesthetics
The overall look of the cover on the bed is not quite that important for the best chance of restful sleep but I do think it helps to walk into a bedroom and see a bed that looks really beautiful and inviting.
I have always found both the buttons and the poppers ugly at the end of the duvet cover, especially now with my lovely low foot end oak bed.
With my design the closures are entirely hidden from view and at the bottom end of the duvet is just a solid stitched seam with or without an Oxford edge.
The perfect design for your room
This can be quite tricky!
You may well be limited by cost to start with and then that only leaves you certain designs to choose from, often resulting in the choice of the best of those available.
This means you have a duvet cover that does kind of work with your room décor but is far from what you may have had in mind to start with.
When you make your own bed linen you can have exactly what YOU want and can tie it in with the rest of the room décor far more easily. Especially if you are also making your own curtains or other soft furnishing items for the room.
Quality versus price
Those sets you will be choosing from if you are on a similar budget to me will likely be made from an inferior 100% cotton sheeting or polycotton or even worse 100% polyester!
AND they will not be made very well.
I will say it again because it’s worth repeating:
When you make your own bed linen you can have exactly what YOU want!
Yes! You can grab top quality long staple cotton flat sheets in the sales with which to make your set from.
You are also in control of how your cover is made up, and trust me, even a novice sewer can do a far better job than those on offer in the shops that you won’t need to take out a mortgage for!
So the quality versus price issue is dealt with too.
AND your beautiful handiwork will last a lot longer than the stuff you might buy from the stores.
Necessity – mother of invention
My ‘best duvet cover’ design came about in order to deal with these niggles for myself.
Those easy-to-put-on covers out on the market already just didn’t live up to what I knew I wanted from a duvet cover.
Some are made up of so much fabric that they would be even worse to deal with in the washing machine.
Others have fasteners all the way round 3 sides. A huge expanse of fabric to wash and not so attractive. AND full of creases if you’re not going to iron them.
And hardly any of them were made in the quality of fabric that is my personal choice, and with those very expensive ones that were the colour choices were seriously limited.
Also the only solution I have found to keeping the duvet in place is the DIY one of adding ribbons to both the cover and duvet, which I can imagine will come undone unless they are done up so tight that they will be a nightmare to untie!
So as already said, I designed my own cover just for myself, in order to deal with all these issues.
But as soon as I’m happy that my design has been fully ‘tested’ and that there are no remaining ‘niggles’, I have decided to offer the pattern and sewing instructions together with a few extras for sale at a very reasonable cost.