January is the season of White!

I guess January is the official "White Sale" season because every major retailer is having a bedding sale. We've been making do with the most minimal and basic of bedding for the past 1.5 years mainly because bedding can be extremely tacky, like bed-in-a-bag polyester sets such as this gem:



to extremely expensive, such as this $400 (yes, for just the duvet) from Hotel Collection that I have been eyeing for over a year.



It doesn't look like much online but in person, the fabric is lovely and sumptuous, weighty, with a great hand feel and a lovely metallic sheen to it. It's more champagne with just a hint of blue. As you can see...I really liked it. In fact, I even bought it once when it went down to $210 but returned it the next day when I realized that I just couldn't handle spending $210 on some fabric, albeit nice fabric, sewn together. So...back it went and my conscious eased up.

Fast-forward over a year later...hubby and I are still using 2 separate blankets (apparently, I am a blanket-stealer), mismatched but happy. We went to the mall to burn off calories after the post-Christmas feasts (yes, plural), and discovered that the January White Sale was in full swing! We've had about $220 in Macys gift cards burning a hole in my wallet for over a year now so we decided to hunt for a new king sized down comforter that we could share in peace. Unfortunately, the down comforters that we liked were about double what I had in gift cards but luckily, a nearby Hotel Collection display was much more fruitful! No, the "Rings" collection we originally liked was not on sale but a brand new collection was even better!

Behold, the lovely Ombre Mosaic! Neutral? check. Classic? check. Cotton? Mostly cotton...can't expect 100% for metallic fabric anyway, right? As an added bonus, this set didn't require dry cleaning while the Rings did!



Thanks to a 10% coupon on top of the store sale price, we picked up the duvet cover and matching bedskirt. Since the color is so neutral (champagne ombre base with a subtle pearl colored patterns), we were free to mix and match sheets! Further digging in the 50% off lowest clearance price pile yielded this lovely beige Hotel Collection set (top and bottom sheets + 2 shams). It is almost a match of our duvet cover color so I don't mind the slight pink stitching detail.



We walked around with our items for a bit before taking the plunge to burn up the gift cards on bedding. Since we've had the gift cards for about 1.5 years now and never used it, we decided that it's better used on something we like and would use rather than letting it sit in my wallet until who-knows-when. After all is said and down, we only had to add about $30 for the duvet, bedskirt, and sheet-set. As soon as we got home, I laundered everything and everything held up nicely in the wash :) Now it is sitting pretty in the linen closet for when I get the opportunity to change linens!