A New Bedhead

I have been wanting an upholstered bedhead for our master bedroom for a while now but wow those things can be expensive!!

So thanks to a great tutorial from Addicted2Decorating we have managed to make one ourselves.....

After debating colours for the past few months, I really wanted to use a nice natural linen colour but realised that it would probably be lost in our room with our wall colour, so after deciding to go a dark grey I managed to pick up some upholstery fabric from Spotlight in a charcoal colour which was perfect!

Next we picked up some cut to size 18mm MDF from Bunnings and some 2 inch foam cut to size from Clark Rubber and some curtain cord.

I organised a local upholsterer to cover some buttons (100!!) for me in my charcoal fabric which turned out fantastic!! We didn't use the 100 on the bedhead but I got enough done so I can do the foot stool later on.

Dad kindly let me raid his tool shed where we nabbed an electric staple gun and a little leather working tool that is pretty much just a handle with a long needle on it so that I could do the deep buttoning - thanks Dad!

and we were off....

First we glued the foam to the MDF and began marking out where we wanted our buttons.... we then set about predrilling our button holes through the foam & mdf board and then used a holesaw attachement on our drill to cut out the foam for our tufting

next we lay the 2 layers of batting over the board followed by our fabric and this is where the tricky work started..... we placed the headboard over the top of 2 dining chairs to give us room to work underneath it.

we really needed 2 of us for this to work well, so one of us worked under the headboard armed with the long arm needle, a staple gun & hammer & the other worked on top of the headboard armed with the buttons & curtain cord.

starting from the centre allan worked from underneath the headboard and pushed the long arm needle through the predrilled holes till I could just feel the needle poking into the fabric. once the position was right i pushed the fabric down onto the needle so it pierced the fabric. after tieing & knotting the curtain cord to the buttons I threaded the two ends of curtain cord through the eye of the needle and allan pulled these down towards him.

in order to get the deep buttoning we found the person on top had to apply a fair bit of pressure so that the buttons went all the way down to the mdf board, this gets pretty hard on your fingers after a few buttons and after realising I had another 40 or so to go we had to find something that we could use the apply the pressure - the rubber handle of a hammer came in perfectly useful for this!!

so with pressure applied from the top allan began stapling the curtain cord underneath to hold the buttons tight.

as in the tutorial from Addicted2Decorating we did the buttoning along the main lines first which actually gave a really nice look on its own - strangely we loved how the buttoning looked with just the main lines done while the board was lying on the dining chairs and thought perhaps we might leave it just like that.... but after carrying it into the bedroom to see how it would look it just didn't look the same upright... weird huh

so we continued on with the deep buttoning on the diagonals and all of a sudden it all came together!! the headboard took on exactly the look i was after and i started to realise that this was going to work and look really good (one very happy girl at this point!)

once all the deep buttoning was done we starting on securing the fabric around the edges to the back of the mdf. This part i found really really frustrating, trying to get the folds from the buttons to edge of the board to all look the same was tricky but we managed in the end and then neatly trimmed away the left over fabric and batting.

i really didn't want this headboard to be screwed into the wall so we had to work out a way for it to be freestanding, and let me tell you this thing is like seriously heavy - my foot can testify to that after I dropped the finished headboard on my foot late one night..... over a month on and it is still sore to touch!!

but anyways back to the legs.... we decided to get some steel pieces which my dad kindly welded together for us into L shaped legs, sprayed them black and screwed them into the back of the headboard - this worked a treat but sadly haven't snapped any pics of these legs just yet

now i have to say although i have stapled some more batting to the back of the headboard to cover the steel legs and all the stapled curtain cord i haven't put a backing piece of fabric on it so this one isnt stamped done just yet but hey close enough :)

we are loving this headboard in our bedroom, the colour is perfect, size is perfect, the depth of the buttoning is just right and it is great to lean up against with a book and a hot cuppa, but i think the fact that we did it ourselves makes it all sooo much better!

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a big thanks to Kristi from Addicted2Decorating for posting this tutorial, i spend so much time window shopping on the net for all the pretty things i would love to have for our house but the budget will only allow so much!! so to find tutorials like these that allow you to have the things that help make your house a home on a budget is bliss! Grab a cuppa and head on over to her blog and check out some of her other works she is one talented lady :)