I fell in love with continental quilts, also called duvets, the first time I visited my future husband’s home in Wales. It was December and the weather was cold and wet, as only Wales can be. I thought I might never feel my toes again. Curling up in the lofty warmness of the duvet on my bed was heaven. I dragged my poor beau all over Cardiff looking for a duvet that I could take back to the States. What I hadn’t realized then was, we didn’t have duvets in the early 1980s (am I dating myself?), and we most certainly didn’t have covers for them. I hunted high and low, receiving only strange looks from department store assistants and having no luck coming up with a cover for my bunch of feathers. I finally decided I needed to make my own duvet cover.

My first one was crude: two sheets sewn together like a big envelope. It was kind of like making a raincoat for an elephant. My love of duvets has remained over the years, and I have gotten proficient at making covers for them. For many years, I did not have a space big enough to lay out and measure my covers, so I devised a way to make a cover with only one measurement (and two if the duvet is not 108 inches wide).

I still use two sheets on occasion, but most often I make a cover with a decorator print fabric for the top and a sheet for the bottom. My duvet is 108 inches wide by 96 inches long, so two lengths of 54-inch-wide decorator fabric are perfect for the width.

It is important for this way of making a cover that you have good-quality, squarely woven fabrics. If your fabrics are…