Confession time. That is the clickiest of click bait titles ever. I’d apologize, but if you clicked it, you deserve what’s coming to bore you stupid. To everyone else, welcome back! I’ve missed you. Ahem, where was I? Oh yes…

I try to be careful with money, in that, I shop at second hand stores and will rummage through giant bins at Goodwill depots looking for super cheap stuff. But every once in a while, I snap and I buy an expensive (read overpriced) item. And subsequently come to regret it. This is one of those stories.

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Winter is coming, I scroll through Facebook marketplace trying to find a new comforter cover. I feel the need to upgrade because the one I currently own–and bought all the matching pillows for–is getting old. I see something I like and click it before realizing it is a link to Etsy or one of those other dubious product websites offered as click bait. (Fool me once…apparently fool me every single time.)

To make a long story about waffling back and forth on whether or not to buy this very expensive but pretty comforter cover short, I plunk down my credit card and wait for it to arrive.

That’s about when the case of faux bed bugs happened. If you missed that infectious tale, see post link Lesson the Second.

As I am recovering from an episode of my life I call The Itchy Bitchy Whiny Woman and the Itty Bitty Very Bad Bugs, I see that there are matching pillow shams to go with the duvet. I order them despite the fact they cost an indecent amount…each. (Go ahead, guess. You’ll be wrong.) After they arrive, one-at-a time, I store them un-opened until the plague of infectious pests passes.

A month later, when I am certain I am louse free, I open the bag to discover what my pretty floral mortgage payment bought me:

What I had not understood from the carefully crafted images on line, was not only was this a printed fabric (meaning someone took a jpeg and plopped it like a giant photocopy onto a base fabric, but that they also enlarged that image to stretch to fill the much bigger area of the duvet.) Thus incurring my wrath forevermore. (If that is not a word, it should be.)

Those of you who take photographs or work with low-quality images can tell you–smaller print images hide flaws that enlarging them reveals. On the pillows, the flowers look pretty normal–if a little faded because the color wasn’t as vibrant in person either. Pictures lie! But the duvet cover revealed the terrible truth. Enlarged…oh, man…you could see the ragged, pixelated edges of the flowers–which were about ten times as big as the flowers on the pillow shams. The duvet looked fuzzy and slightly out of focus. It may not bother most people, but it bothered the heck out of me.

Here they are side by side and with my hand as a measure of scale.

When I went back to the seller to complain, I noticed that there was a No Returns/No Refunds policy. Sigh.

I moped about this purchase for months afterward. I never used the set. They are still bagged up somewhere in my house. This story might have remained a sad life lesson, but there came a moment of karmic balance when my friend Sheryl posted that she was taking in sewing projects to make some extra money.

I told her my sad story. Mentioned that there was a pattern of sheets I bought that I absolutely love. But, the sellers on Amazon did not have any bedspreads to match. She offered to make the duvet cover for a very reasonable price. And, I bought an extra set of sheets so she could make a matching bed skirt to replace my old one.

I guess the aphorism is true.

Revenge is a dish best served on a bed of roses!

[FOOTNOTE: For those of you groaning at that malapropism, be grateful I could not come up with a variation on “Making one’s bed and having to lie in it.” You’re welcome.]