Finished Headboard

Since our headboard was looking too drab (all white diamond-print quilting fabric), I decided I needed to find a more exciting fabric. I loved the DwellStudio fabrics that I saw online, so I ordered 2.5 yards of the Bella Porta Charcoal from fabric.com. It wasn't cheap ($18.98/yard), but definitely cheaper than ordering it from Dwell, which would have been $42 per yard.  With free shipping at fabric.com it was a pretty good deal. Trust me, I searched and searched for cheaper fabric, both online and Joann's but couldn't decide on something I really liked.

The pattern ran vertically, but the fabric width was 54", so I needed two pieces sewn together down the middle to make the pattern run vertically on the headboard. My friend Jill helped me a bunch by sewing my fabric down the center.  This was no easy task since we had to line up and pin the fabric just right so when we opened it, the pattern was seamless.

Here is Jill sewing the fabric together. She did an amazing job. Thanks Jill!

When I got home, I was so excited to get it on the headboard so I took the headboard off the wall, ironed my fabric and began to staple. What do you know, I ran out of staples half way through so my sweet husband made a Lowes run at 8 PM for more. Now that's a man you gotta love.

I put my headboard back up on the wall, but whoops I'm not done yet with it. It still needed legs! It just didn't look okay floating on the wall. Pardon the messy room!

My husband cut some scrap pieces of wood (some spare lengths of stud beams) to span the distance from the floor to the headboard. He then wrapped the faux legs in some leftover fabric, stapling along the back.

Not sure what kind of corner fold this is, but it worked well.

The foam part of the headboard was 1 1/4" away from the wall, which meant we needed spacers behind the legs to allow them to be in-line with the soft foam. First, Joe drilled a drywall anchor at two locations for each leg (the big hole is where the first anchor ran into the edge of the wall stud).

Next, he cut four 1 1/4" pieces of wood from another scrap length, drilled a large pilot hole to allow a 3" wood screw (actually a deck screw) to pass freely through the spacer, while screwing firmly into the anchor in the wall.

We weren't sure whether screws or nails would work better to connect the leg to the spacer, so we tried both. Joe made a small slit in the fabric, then drilled a pilot hole through each leg, then fastened to the spacers either using a 3" screw or a 2" nail (this is what we had lying around). The leg was 1 1/2" thick, so we needed decent-size screws/nails.

The bed hid the screw holes pretty well, but we wanted to cover them completely, so we trimmed a small bit of fabric of the same pattern and glued them directly over the screws. In retrospect, other methods for attaching legs to the headboard or attaching them to the wall (a thin spacer running from floor to headboard with a long strip of velcro, or another flush-mount) might have been simpler. But, in the end we're happy with the results.

Now, onward to bedding! We'll have the full bedroom makeover next week.  

xo

Cathleen