Reupholstering the Hope Chest

Now that we're all settled into our new house, I decided I should probably decorate it. The bathrooms are complete, the walls now have art, the table has a tablecloth, and the beds have bed spreads and throw pillows. So I decided to actually get to work on our bedroom because it is irritating me to no end. The bed sits on the floor, had no head board, no side tables and the hope chest needed reupholstering. So, first project on the list was to get the feet for the bed. However, it takes a couple of weeks for them to get here so in the mean time, it's reupholstering season.

The hope chest had a print on it from when my mom redecorated my room in a floral theme. The colors actually could have worked, but there was a massive grease stain on it plus a brownish splotch (like soda had been spilled on it or something), so it had to go.

So here is the old hope chest:

Grease Stain:

And here are all the things I needed for the jog: solid fabric, lace fabric, scissors, screw driver, and a staple gun w/staples.

I got my fabric at the old Walmart, where they cut it down to the size I needed, so I only needed to trim a bit of excess fabric. I centered my headboard fabric side down. I pulled the fabric up and folded the frayed edge under. I notice a lot of people don't do this step on their DIY projects; they just tug and staple. I'm sure it's fine in most cases, but if you have a delicate fabric or a really frayed edge, your staples can pull lose if you don't double it over. Anyway, put one staple on each side to secure and then staple all the way around like so:

you may have noticed the funny corners, how astute of you. here will always be a pleat when you fold corners. There is no real "method" of how to do it, just fold it until you find a way you like then repeat it on all four corners. You may need to cut away some of the excess fabric to make this easier (just make sure you leave enough to fold over to the back).

Since I had two layers of fabric, I didn't mind too much what the bottom layer corners looked like:

Then I repeated the process with the lace:

Then I screwed the lip back on and voila! The green is more noticeable in person, but I'm happy with it :)