How to Create a Bold Floral Bedding Design Collection

Adding fresh-cut flowers to your home can bring vibrancy and a touch of nature to your decor, but sadly they don’t last long. However, there is an easy, long-lasting way to fill your house with a pop of flowers every day—through including floral designs in your home decor. Brittany Watson Jepsen of The House That Lars Built shares how she created a stunning bedding collection using vintage floral themes and fresh classics. Each post in this 7-part artist education series dives deeper into the design and curation of a bedding collection selected for our 2023 Summer Lookbook. Below you’ll learn insider tips from Brittany about creating the collection and how it caught Spoonflower’s Senior Manager of Merchandising Emerson Jones’s eye. 

The hero of this collection is our Retro Florals design, a pattern featuring a retro-vibed floral in various color combinations. It hearkens back to the bright, happy, hippy florals of the 60s and 70s, but in a modern way. We created this floral in a few different sizes because while an oversized print can be SO fun, it can be calmer in a smaller scale, which some people prefer. To pair with the floral design, we added in supportive patterns like the trendy yet classic checkerboard print Olive Checkers. We included our olive-green-and-white-checkerboard print in this collection, but we also have several other checkerboard designs in our Spoonflower shop. Checkerboard is absolutely of the moment, but it’s also something that has been around for centuries so you can never go wrong. I still love it!  

We also blended in a smaller Red and Lilac Stripe design to tie in the colors from the floral duvet. Given this design’s smaller scale, 0.5″ (1.27 cm), it doesn’t compete with the larger scale floral and checkerboard designs. Lastly, the Retro Rainbow Marble Large design brings all the patterns together. The marbling process—done with water—brings out the organic quality of the floral pattern and the geometrics of the stripes and checkerboard designs. This collection spells out FUN! 

When curating and designing this collection, I thought about who might want to sleep in a group of patterns like these. While the selected designs can strike anyone’s fancy, I think they’d be great for kids, teens and college kids. The oversized quality of the Retro Floral design spells out whimsy so it’s perfect for a younger demographic. 

This collection’s bright palette was inspired by my love of color. I love bright colors, but I also love adding neutrals within palettes to tone the more vibrant hues down. Where there are pops of bright orange in the collection, there is also a more neutral olive green. Where there is a bright blue, there’s a lovely cream to compensate. There needs to be some rest for the eye.

How does the experience of curating for this project affect how you’ll design for collections moving forward? 

Seeing this collection in person is so so fun! It makes me think of what kind of bedroom collection I’d like to fall asleep in. Whereas this collection is bright and colorful and has lots of momentum, I also want to play into creating bedroom collections that evoke a place of refuge and calmness. There’s a way to bring in bright colors and whimsy in a softer way, which is a good challenge to keep in mind. Curating designs together for collections helps spark new possibilities for what I want to create next.  

We also asked Spoonflower’s Senior Manager of Merchandising Emerson Jones to share what it was about Brittany’s collection that caught her eye for its inclusion in our Summer Lookbook:

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