How to Design Room Bedding
Designing bedding is all about the fabric. The feel is important: you want the best-quality cotton, or the softest flannel. The look is equally crucial. When you design it yourself, you can create exactly what you want, whether it's homey plaid flannel or 400-thread-count Egyptian cotton printed with intricate hand-drawn illustrations. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
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Look at existing bedding for inspiration. When you see a pattern you like, examine how it's applied to each piece of bedding: pillowcases and shams, sheets, and duvet covers. Some design schemes will vary a pattern from piece to piece--for example, with a circular pattern, the shams might feature repeating rows of circles all over the fabric, while the duvet cover might have just one row of circles in the middle of the cover, with the rest of the cover plain white.
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Sketch your design using pencil and paper.
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Scan your design onto your computer. Be sure to make a high-resolution scan, and save the image at the highest possible quality. It's important to keep pencil lines looking crisp, and to be able to zoom in and tweak tiny details of your drawing.
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Make "repeats." Copy and paste several copies of your design into a new blank image file, and arrange them as you want them to appear on the bedding fabric. If you're making different layouts for different pieces of bedding, save each bedding's layout in a different image file. For example, if you want your duvet to feature a plain background with just one central column of your repeating design, but you want your bedsheets to have neat, close-together rows of the design, make two files, one named "Duvet" and one "Sheets."
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Decide on a color scheme. Apply it to your image files. You can make more than one color scheme for a specific design--this is called a "colorway." For example, if you have a geometric pattern featuring tiled circles on a plain background, one colorway might have navy circles on a white background, while another colorway might feature white circles on a navy background. You can use different colorways on different pieces of bedding within the same "collection." Perhaps you want your bedspread to be navy-on-white and your shams to be white-on-navy.
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Choose your fabric. Generally, geometric and modern patterns look better on crisp Egyptian cotton, while floral and plaid patterns go with flannel or cotton percale.
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Send your design to a printing mill. Usually, you email the mill your image file. When your fabric "proofs," or "strike-offs," come back, make any changes and send the proofs back to the mill. When your fabric is just the way you want it, order as many yards as you need, and either sew your bedding yourself, or have it made for you.
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Alternately, design your bedding through a custom web site, such as the ones in Resources 2 and 3 below.
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