Footstool

Here it is already Wednesday and time for us to share another project with you.  This week we are going to use upholstery fabric to recover a small footstool.  This was a find from a garage sale and it was in need of a change.  We thought this would be a nice project for those of you who like a little challenge.  This took about two hours to complete from beginning to end. 

As you can see this footstool was in need of some new upholstery fabric.  The finish was in good shape and so we did not do any stripping or varnishing. 

To begin with this project, we needed to have the following:  2/3 yard of upholstery

                                                                                        1 foot of foam (12" x 18" - 1" depth)

                                                                                        1 yard of quilt batting

In addition we needed some tools such as a hammer, screwdriver, pliers and a staple gun.  Depending on your project, you may need some or all of these.

We needed to unscrew the top off and take out the staples on the back piece.  This is in really good shape so we are going to reuse this piece of fabric.  We then took the staples from the upholstery fabric.  This was a little time consuming but it was worth it in the end.  It will depend on what you are upholstering, if you need to do this step or not.  It varies from how the piece you are upholstering is attached as some are stapled, some are done with tacks, and maybe some have been glued.   As you can see, we ended up with the fabric, foam and piece of wood.

Next we trimmed our piece of foam by using the old piece as a pattern.  This is upholstery foam and you need either a serrated knife or an electric knife to trim it to the right size.   We then took the old piece of upholstery fabric and cut a new piece using it as a pattern.  You will note that we did cut the piece a little bigger as the old piece was quite thin and it is always better to have a little bit more than not enough when you are doing a project.  You can always trim away the excess if you do not need it.

Next we took the foam using it as our pattern size and cut a piece of the quilt batting.  This is going to be wrapped around the foam to give it a nice finished look.                                                                                   

 

You will then staple the first piece of fabric that you originally took off to give it that finished look.  As we said before, this piece was in really good shape so we reused it, however, if your piece is not, there are many different types of fabrics that you could use to give your project a nice finished look.

Reattach the screws that were taken out and you have a beautiful reupholstered footstool that you can use again and again. 

For those of you who are wanting to try your hand at upholstering, this is fairly easy and there is not too much expense involved so go for it.