Saturday, November 1, 2008

Project: tufting a padded headboard

As some of you may already know, I am in the Dallas-Fort Worth area visiting my daughter. Our goals for this short week were to spend a day shopping at the WTC for The Green Pea, catch up on some home projects at my daughter's home, attend BSF in Grapevine, pick out some fabric at a discount warehouse in Dallas, and hit the market in Canton on Friday. We were able to check everything off of our list except (regrettably) our day in Canton. I have to apologize to my new blogger friends as I was looking forward to meeting some of you! We had to forgo our day in Canton so that I could shop in the WTC one more day. Hang tight, though, as I promise that I will be back soon! I always plan my trips around Canton's First Trade Mondays!

I want to show you one of the neat projects that we worked on in my daughter Brandy's home. She wanted to create a tall, padded headboard for her guest bedroom upstairs. My husband built her the wooden frame. She applied foam to the front side of it---here is a picture of it leaning against the wall:


She picked out a lovely linen Chinoiserie fabric to apply to the headboard and to make a bedskirt out of. You can see the fabric on the bed. After applying the foam, she wrapped the headboard with the batting and brought it around the sides to the back.



And next went on the fabric! Voile!


And look what a beautiful job she did matching and seaming the fabric together:


Gorgeous! I thought the headboard was simply elegant the way that it was, but my daughter was insistent on tufting it to give it "a more posh look." And so this was the task that I was called in to help handle.

We penciled out a grid on the back of the headboard and drilled small holes into the back of the wood. My daughter placed a small screw beside each hole but did not tighten it down completely. She had her buttons already covered and prepped; she looped multiple strands of upholstery thread through each button, then pulled all the thread ends through a long upholstery needle through all the layers and out the designated holes. I stood at the front side of the headboard and pushed the button in as deep as I could into the foam while she tied it off in the back on the screw. What a job! My arms were tired from muscling in those buttons!

I tried to be as meticulous as I could about choosing and matching the perfect covered button for the toile. Look how fantastic this looks!

We got some good mother-daughter time in together. It took us a couple of hours to get it complete. My daughter is an animal lover (with 4 pets) and she brought her parrot upstairs with us while we worked. Titus kept us entertained with his non-stop chatter and added to our fun.

Here you can see the partially-completed headboard, Titus on his perch, and me on my cell calling in to The Green Pea.

My daughter Brandy loves to decorate and design and sew. She promised she would send me pictures of her room once she made the matching bedskirt and has the room put together.

Here is a photo of her with her latest acquisition, a rescue puppy from Hurricane Ike:


One of the other sewing projects that we started at my daughter's home was making cafe curtains for some of my display hutches back at the boutique. We picked up some pretty black-and-white striped fabric from Dallas---a la French style! I designed one with my daughter and am taking it back home with me to try out before she finishes the rest of them off for me.

Tonight, I am back in California---my Texas trip went by too fast! Texas is an incredibly hospitable state, but it always so nice to be back home again too.