Beautiful Bedding Ideas

The right bedding brings color and comfort to the bedroom.

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Match Bedding Style to Furniture

Choose Timeless Color Combinations

Combine Cool Colors

Make Your Own Duvet Cover

Play with Color and Pattern

Create a Serene Scheme with Bedding

Indulge in Luxury Bedding

Go With Retro Bedding

Create Color Schemes with Pillows

Practice Pillowscaping

Mix and Match Bedding for Personal Style

A Seasonal Makeover with Bedding

Retro Bedding for a Teen Room

Proper Care for Sheets

Keep Three Sets of Sheets for Each Bed

Create Your Own Bed Skirt

Limit the Pillows for a Tailored Look

Balance Color and Pattern with White

Energize with High-Contrast Colors

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Match Bedding Style to Furniture

For a clean, contemporary look, choose bed linens that harmonize with the straight lines and contemporary style of the furniture. Limit the pattern palette to two contrasting patterns and a solid.

Here, multicolor pinstripe cotton sheets and pillow cases lay the foundation, and a simple gray and white wave pattern on the duvet and Euro shams breathes light and air into the room. A pair of solid accent pillows pulls the persimmon color out of the sheets.

Choose Timeless Color Combinations

Invest in quality bedding and a timeless color combination and you'll enjoy the sheets for years. This color combination of white and brown creates a serene mood and suits any decorating style, from the traditional bedroom shown here to a contemporary one.

Luxury sheets with a decorative top edge are meant to be turned back over the coverlet to display the edging. Pillow shams on the accent pillows repeat the edging, while the bed pillows feature an embroidered vine motif.

Combine Cool Colors

Create a cool, serene mood in the bedroom with solid-color bedding in a palette of soft blue and white. Here plum and black accents tie the bedding to the lavender walls and espresso brown headboard and bed frame.

To keep the look uncluttered, cover the box spring in a white sheet to match the fitted sheet and tuck the top sheet and bed cover behind the bed rails. The throw and duvet add softness while preserving the tailored appearance.

Make Your Own Duvet Cover

It's easy to make your own duvet cover and matching pillow shams from upholstery fabric. A traditional floral design in a fashionable mocha-and-rose colorway is the starting point for cottage style in this bedroom. Blue ruffled edging ties the custom-made duvet and pillow shams to the upholstered headboard, while an antique quilt complements the color scheme.

Play with Color and Pattern

Lively bedding is an easy way to introduce color and pattern into the bedroom. Here, tangerine and blue create playful mood next to the traditional wallpaper and headboard. A range of blues from dark to light provide the dominant theme, and orange supplies the accents.

For an even bolder scheme, the pairing could be reversed, with orange as the dominant hue and shades of blue as accents.

The mix of patterns contributes to the lively mood. Checks, dots, circles, and diamonds play off of each other, held together by color.

Create a Serene Scheme with Bedding

Pale blue and cocoa brown are a perfect pairing of warm and cool that's classic, contemporary, and serene. An embroidered circle motif on the coverlet repeats shapes in the engravings lined up along the top of the headboard, unifying design elements.

To create a scheme like this, bring the wall color to the bed with the coverlet, then balance it with brown sheets, accent pillows, and a throw. A pair of accent pillows that contains both colors helps knit the scheme together.

Indulge in Luxury Bedding

Luscious Italian bed linens make this bed irresistibly inviting. The cotton sateen sheets, pillow shams, Euro shams, and duvet feature a hemstitched contrast border that emphasizes the caramel color in the striped bed skirt and decorative pillows.

In sateen sheets, one weft thread weaves over several warp threads, then under one and over another several more. This results in a smoother fabric with a luminous sheen and a buttery softness. Expect luxury sateen sheets to have a thread count of 350 to 500.

Go With Retro Bedding

Evoke a modern mood with retro colors and tailored designs. The chartreuse wool bedcover sports raised white stitching that streams from the head of the bed to the foot, playing off the bed's straight lines.

Decorative pillows pull together the 1970s-inspired color scheme of chartreuse and brown, with steely gray as 21st-century neutral to cool the scheme. Contemporary bedmaking means dispensing with layers of pillows. Keep two or three for sleeping and add no more than three accent pillows to reinforce the color scheme--otherwise you'll end up with pillows all over the place.

Create Color Schemes with Pillows

Layers of pillows bring color from the headboard down to the bed in this neutral bedroom. The print pillow shams inspire the color scheme, and an assortment of solids and companion prints offer a range of tones and hues. A chenille patchwork quilt emphasizes the bolder hues.

These high-quality top sheets are extra long so they can be folded back over the coverlet.

Practice Pillowscaping

Think of bed pillow arrangement as "pillowscaping." For an uncluttered look, prop large, square pillows against the ones you use for sleeping--the bed pillows hold the decorative ones at a pleasing angle. Then arrange orderly rows of pillows in contrasting shapes, coverings, and sizes. Here, the blue-on-white medallion print of the duvet cover repeats on the pair of rectangular pillows. Solid blue rectangular pillows provide transition to striped bolsters.

Balance the pillow display with a plump duvet at the foot of the bed.

Mix and Match Bedding for Personal Style

Why confine yourself to the bed-in-a-bag approach? Instead of buying a matching set, mix up your own bouquet of sheets, pillowcases, and coverlets to make your own creative statement.

Bright orange jersey-knit sheets are T-shirt soft and comfortable year-round. Jersey quality is determined by weight rather than thread count, but the label may not include the weight. Look for 100 percent cotton and test it by stretching the fabric: It should pop back to its original shape.

For a tailored look, wrap the bed in a reversible box-stitched quilt instead of covering the sheets with a coverlet. That way you can introduce a fun and funky element like this raffia bed skirt.

A Seasonal Makeover with Bedding

Give the bedroom a whole new look with a complete change of bedding colors and textures that reflect the season. The texture-rich combination here gets the bed ready for fall and winter.

A corduroy coverlet paired with an old-gold Indian-inspired top sheet, an orange bolster, and raised-velvet pillows offer tactile and visual warmth. Pear-colored pillowcases and a fitted sheet provide light color contrast, and a thick toile-covered duvet promises toasty warmth on long winter nights.

Retro Bedding for a Teen Room

Jazz up a teen's room with a bedding color scheme of chocolate and lime green. Accent pillows stitched from faux fur and polished cotton give the full-size bed the look and function of a daybed. Instead of a headboard, firm wedge-shape pillows provide back support. Matching fabric edged with glass beads is stitched to a chenille bedspread to make the coverlet.

Proper Care for Sheets

Always launder new sheets before using them to remove residual sizing, chemical odors, and finishes from the manufacturing process. Most sheets should be washed in warm water and mild detergent with like colors. Dry them on low to medium heat. Too-high temperatures will dry out cotton fibers.

These cherry red solid sheets and pillow cases should be laundered with other dark colors. Remove them promptly from the dryer to minimize wrinkling.

Keep Three Sets of Sheets for Each Bed

When you're stocking the linen closet, think variety. A set of sateen or percale sheets in your preferred color scheme will keep the bed cool and comfortable in summer. For winter, a flannel set provides cozy warmth. It's also a good idea to have three sets of sheets: one on the bed, one in the closet, and one in the laundry. Rotating sheets makes them last longer.

Also invest in at least two duvet covers, one for summer and one for winter.

Create Your Own Bed Skirt

For a daybed pushed up against one wall, fashion a one-of-a-kind bed skirt from table linens. Spread a pair of square tablecloths over the box spring and layer table runners over them to cover the gaps and add dimension. Tuck the top sheet and blanket or bed cover under the mattress for a crisp, clean line.

Stack decorative pillows at the head of the bed to reinforce your color scheme and create a welcoming look.

Limit the Pillows for a Tailored Look

As in any room, one easy way to develop a color scheme is to start with a fabric you love. The coverlet at the end of this bed was custom-made from upholstery fabric.

Its elegant, formal pattern guides the choice of gold basketweave sheets and cranberry red quilt and pillow shams. The cashmere throw at the end of the bed echoes the gold as well.

For a contemporary, tailored look like this, limit the pillows to the ones you sleep on, a pair of Euro-style pillows for color, and an accent pillow for emphasis.

Balance Color and Pattern with White

An antique blue and white quilt drove the bedding color scheme in this master bedroom. Mellow yellows, delftlike blues, and pure whites make a cheerful combination that unifies a variety of patterns.

Using the large check for the bed skirt puts the visually heaviest pattern nearest the floor. A white coverlet provides relief from the patterns.

Energize with High-Contrast Colors

Bold color and simple geometrics enliven a teen space. A complementary color scheme brings together opposites on the color wheel to create a high-energy, high-contrast scheme.

Mix and match bed linens to bring in different shades of the dominant colors. Here periwinkle and delft blue stripes pick up the cornflower blue dots in the sheets and play off the cobalt blue blanket and navy and cobalt duvet. An orange top sheet wraps the box spring for a colorful, tailored look, and the red-orange dotted blanket picks up the red-orange dot in the fitted sheet.

Beautiful Bedding Ideas

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