Painting fabric furniture is a great idea. Have you ever found the perfect chair for your room at a thrift store or garage sale, but it is in the ugliest fabric ever?
Now you can change that! What color would you like it to be? You get to choose any color you want and make it match any room or decor that is in your home. Then when you get tired of the color, change it again. The secret is in the paint and in the wax.
Yes, I did say wax. But its not like the wax your grandmother used to put on her floors or the wax you put on your car. It is made just for this. You will want to use this wax so you can paint it again and again. If you use your grandmothers wax, you will be sorry.
I have always wanted to do this and this tutorial was the best I have seen in a long time. I am a huge thrifter, meaning I go to a lot of thrift shops and garage sales. You just don’t realize how ugly furniture has been over the last 100 years. Why did our grandparents ever think this was great fabric for their home? But now we don’t have to live with what they thought was in the height of fashion any more.
Paint it and go. You can find the full directions here for painting fabric furniture.
Make Your Own Annie Sloan Chalk Paint
Annie Sloan Chalk Paint is the most popular and the most expensive. Here is a simple home-made Chalk Paint recipe that works just as well. I have a friend that uses this formula all the time and her work is lovely. Plaster of Paris is the secret. This is something we can pick up in our local hardware stores for practically nothing and then use a common floor wax that you can find just about anywhere. This is so simple!!!
You can find the full directions here for mock Annie Sloan Chalk Paint.
What if there is wood on your furniture?
If there is wood on the chair that you want to keep in the original state, you might want to either strip it of old varnish or restore it in some way to make the beauty of the wood shine through. Do this before you paint the fabric and then protect it while painting the fabric.
Also, if the furniture you are painting has tacks as decor around the edges, take those off before you paint. You will want to replace those with new tacks when the chair is dry and ready to use again.
Another Method of Painting Fabric Furniture
If using the Annie Sloan method of painting fabric furniture doesn’t sit well with you, there are other methods.
I have found over the years that when you paint fabric, it will look good, but it gets hard and crunchy if you sit on it. I found this great blog where they discovered the same thing, but found a way around it. Maybe this would be a better idea if you don’t want to use the chalk paint and wax method on your furniture.
Her blog is called A Beautiful Mess and here are all the instructions you will need to finish a project.
I would suggest reading both blogs and then deciding which is right for your piece of furniture that needs painting.
Ok…go find your ugly chair and have fun painting fabric furniture!
