From Duvet To Quilt

I bought a lovely king size duvet cover off of Amazon for the crazy price of $15 (with Prime). It was made of 100% cotton and was very soft and well made. How could I pass it up at that price! I bought it intending to turn it into a lightweight quilt for my bed, which I did! First I laid it out to make sure it laid flat, and it did. I unpicked the stitching for the flange all along the edges, turned it inside out and laid it out on the floor.

Once I had it as flat as I could get it, I sprayed basting spray in sections and placed cotton batting on it, working my way from one end to the other. Once the batting was as secure as I could get it with the spray, I flipped the duvet right-side-out and again, spread it out as flat as I could. Then I pinned it all over with jumbo quilt safety pins to baste the layers together and keep everything in place and decrease shifting as much as possible. Then, using a simple whipstitch, I sewed the duvet opening closed from end to end (it was an evelope opening that ran the width of the duvet, on the underside of of it about 12 inches up from the bottom edge). Once that was done I put the whole thing up on my sewing machine and, using my special quilting foot, I did free-motion quilting all over the entire thing. I did it in sections as much as possible to try and keep it manageable.

Because I was using a classic cotton batting and not a fluffy polyester batting, it made the quilting process much easier and I was able to quilt the entire king sized quilt by myself on my home machine. I can't say that using a duvet to turn into a quilt will yield easy results every time, but this duvet happened to be quite well made and everything was squared up and it laid very flat, so for this project everything seemed to be in my favor. And it was a fairly quick project too, I started it this morning and I was able to finish all of the quilting and sewing in the evening this same day.
**The second picture was taken several days after this was posted and added later. It shows the quilt after I washed and dried it to get it to shrink up with that classic soft, crinkled look I love on quilts so much. I added this second picture at a later date.