Upholstry 101

I haven't had much time for anything else except moving and decorating and here is one of the reasons why. I bought a set of accent chairs on the cheap at Home Goods. The shape was fabulous, but the color and fabric... not so much. In my typical manner, I got it into my head that the apartment was going to have a Victorian circus-meets-industrial loft scheme which sounds cool but actually requires DIY-ing almost everything.


First off, I taped off the upholstery with saran wrap and painters' tape so I could spray paint away the nauseatingly ordinarily wood stain. I chose high-gloss cobalt paint kind of at random. I'm not even a big fan of blue, but it just felt right.

Success! Very shiny and much improved with minimal spray paint on things that were not meant to be painted. Of course, now I was forced to pick a fabric to cover up the awful sage and beige chenille that worked with the blue I had so hastily chosen. I wanted something jewel-toned in a luxe or exotic fabric that didn't quite match the cobalt so the overall effect would be more eccentric and carnival-esque.

I finally found a baby blanket remnant at Joann's that was a really furry, soft thermal poly. Not quite the velvet I had originally envisioned, but close enough and even weirder! The fat stripes sold me.

I didn't even attempt to remove the stock upholstery. Instead, I cut out rough shapes and pinned them on the chair, taking care to center the stripes. That is probably a really bad way to do it unless you're really good at eyeballing pattern pieces. And you should probably measure your yardage needs before you go shopping. After that, I nailed the fabric in place with upholstery tacks and trimmed off the excess.

As a final touch, I hot-glued (surely a furniture no-no) braided trim over the raw edges of the striped thermal. It added a good final pop of mismatched color and made the whole thing look more pro.

The final product!