How to recover an upholstered headboard

I bought a king size upholstered headboard on Cragislist for $50 years ago. It was tan and kind of boring. I've wanted to recover it for ages but couldn't commit to what color - until today!

Here it was - boring tan. Almost the same color as the walls - so it vanished.

And here it is now! A beautiful charcoal gray.

This was a SUPER easy process since this was already an upholstered and tufted headboard. I started by taking the legs off, and then taking the felt-like covering off the back - I just ripped it off. This exposed the wooden back of the headboard.

Then I cut off the old buttons.

Because this is a king sized headboard, my craft room was almost too small to work in! So I spread my fabric out on the kitchen floor and plopped the headboard down on top of it. Pull tight and staple around the edges - it's that easy!!

Now it was time to tuft. I bought button blanks and wrapped them in matching fabric. It took three packs of 4 to get all 10 buttons covered. Each pack was about $2 at Walmart in the craft section.

With tufting I use a super long upholstery needle and thin string or really thick thread.I had the headboard sitting on it's side with the button side facing me. I wanted this really tufted, so once I got the needle and thread through, I pushed the button in as far as I could with my knee and tied the string really tight in the back. I usually use large washers or other buttons on the back side to keep the string from sucking back through the hole. (When I removed the old buttons they had these little metal pieces they used, so I just reused them this time. Washers are cheap and work great - just be sure to get washers bigger then your holes!)

To make sure they were extra secure I tried the string in three knots. Then I bent the string back and forth between some staples to make sure it cannot come undone. Voila! TUFTS!!

I decided not to put fabric over the back to hide the ugly. It's always going to be against a wall, so no one will EVER see it. No sense in worrying about it.

Reattach the legs and it's done. Super quick and easy! Here it is all done in our current master bedroom. I'll post a new "after" photo once we move the master bedroom downstairs into the basement bedroom and get it all set up!