Nursery Project - A Comforter fit for a Prince or Princess!

This post continues the story of the nursery project I have been working on.  This is a Chronicles of Narnia themed nursery, in cream, gold, and red.  The previous post described the valence and pillows.  In this post I describe the baby's comforter, with other crib furnishings to be described in a later post.

The comforter is to be 42" x 52", in cream with a 4" gold band around the top and evenly-spaced tufts..  Centered on the top is to be a gold crown applique.

The first step was to wash all the fabrics.  After all, this is for a baby!

To prepare the top, I cut a smaller rectangle out of the cream and 5" wide strips for the bands. I used strips that were longer than the inside rectangle so that I could miter the corners.

After preparing the top, I will add the crown applique.  The applique was by far the most time-consuming part!

 Meeting with my client, we browsed crown images on the Internet and chose one for the comforter.  It was to be about 12" wide at the base, and centered on the top, with landscape orientation.

I took the image, about 1.5" wide originally, and blew it up to the desired size.  On the left, you can see it has been traced onto light double-sided adhesive paper made for applique work.  I took this piece and adhered it to the wrong side of the gold satin with an iron.

The next tedious step was to carefully cut out the design!

 Here is the cut-out design, with the adhesive backing removed, positioned on the comforter.  Take a minute and admire the scissor workmanship!!

 This is the design after it has been adhered.  It is beautiful and perfect just like this.  However, it would not stay that way.  If I wanted to, I could pick at it and start peeling up the design.  Leaving it like this would work only where it would never be touched or washed!  To keep it safe, I will have to sew around all the edges.

Here you can see the design after I have sewn around all the edges.  I also treated the edges with a treatment that will keep the edges from fraying and threads from loosening.






Now, back to putting the comforter together.

Here is the under side of the top, with the mitered gold bands shown.  In preparing to stitch the top to the under side of the comforter, I am marking the exact width of the band based on the stitching line attaching the band to the inside rectangle.  This ensures the band is a uniform width around the comforter.   Actually, I set up this picture after I did the sewing, but needed to show how the marks were done.




 I stitched just inside the marked line, turning where the bands met in the corner.  Of course, I leave an opening to turn the comforter right side out later.

To fit the batting to the comforter, I laid it over the wrong side of the top, aligning two edges and cutting the other edges to fit.

I then pinned the batting to the wrong side of the top (which is already sewn to the under side of the comforter), flipped it over, and sewed all around (except for the opening), following the same line of stitching used to attached the top and under sides of the comforter.  Finally, I serged all around.

 Turning the comforter right-side-out, I pressed it and hand-closed the opening.  Here you can see the pins marking where the tufts will be.  I sewed the tufts by hand.

 The finished comforter - needing another round of pressing!

It's weird how the camera skews proportions at a distance.  The comforter looks square, but is actually ten inches longer left to right.

A close-up of the crown.

This fabric has worked well - the cream feels good to the touch, and the satin is like liquid gold.  I think it will look beautiful in the nursery!