How to Make an Upholstered Headboard!

I’m sorry that it’s been so long since I’ve posted, guys!  And what’s even more frustrating is that I never got emails telling me I had pending comments, sooooo… I never knew anyone was interested (this is for you Jo! Sorry it took me so long!) until I decided to log into wordpress and write up some posts to make up for my sheer laziness.

To make an upholstered headboard, you will need the following:

1 sheet of 1/2″ plywood, MDF, or even a thrifted headboard/piece of wood
1 foam egg-crate - much cheaper than craft store foam (for a king sized bed, a queen sized foam will work)
1 roll of high loft quilt batting – from a crack, err, craft store
1 fabric covered button kit + refills for however many buttons you would like to have – also from a craft store
1 sheet set or fabric yardage to cover all that foam + to make fabric covered buttons (for a king sized bed, use a queen sheet set or approximately 2.5 yds of 55″ wide fabric)
1 embroidery or upholstery needle, a tapestry needle, and a thimble if you want to protect your fingers
1 spool of upholstery thread in a coordinating color with your headboard fabric – can be found in a craft store too!
1 package of cheap buttons approx. 0.5″ in diameter

a drill with a drill bit large enough to allow a needle to pass through the hole you drill
staple gun with 1/2″ staples… I think
some fine grit sand paper
measuring tape, pencil, all those measuring supplies.  If you’re really anal (like my husband), use a carpenter’s square

How to do it:

1. Measure on the wall where you’d like your headboard to reach.  For ours, I chose to do 48 inches from the top of our box springs.

2. And then add four inches to the width of your bed (80″ total for a king, 64″ for a queen, I believe).  I didn’t do this and the headboard looks a little too narrow if you look at it the right way.

3. Go pick up your plywood/MDF at a home improvement store and get it cut to size.

4.  If you get plywood, you should sand down all the edges of it in order to prevent getting splinters, as well as punching holes in the fabric.

5. Lay out that sucker and mark out button holes.  This is a painstaking process and the measurments are really up to however you woudl like your headboard to look.  You can google images to see what your preference is.  It was easier for us to do two straight lines of buttons.  I’m bad with measuring, so made Brett do it.

6. Drill holes all the way through at the button hole marks.

7. Lift up the plywood and lay out first the quilt batting and then the egg crate.  It’s important to have the nubby parts of the egg crate facing inwards into the board so you have a smooth finished surface. Lay the plywood back down and center it on top of the foam.

8. Starting in the center of the plywood, staple down the egg crate and batting.  You might have to do this in two different steps (I know I did).  Once you get the center top and bottom stapled, do the center of the sides as well.

9. Continue stapling the foam and batting down on all the sides.  The corners can be tricky but try your best to make them rounded out and staple the heck out of them.

10.  Lift the plywood up again and lay out  your fabric or flat sheet if you chose to go that route.  Center the plywood on the fabric.  If you’re using a patterned fabric, this step is difficult, time consuming, and may result in yelling obscenities.

11.  Repeat the process you used to staple the batting and foam to the plywood.

12.  Make the fabric covered buttons.  There are instructions on the button kit. :)

13.  Using the upholstery thread, thread the upholstery needle, and make a few passes through the shank of the fabric button, leaving a long-ish tail of thread off the button.  In other words, the button should be fairly close to the head of the needle at this point.

14.  Using an unthreaded needle… either a tapestry needle or just a very long multipurpose needle… poke through the BACK of the headboard through the pre-drilled holes to the FRONT of the headboard.  Having a thimble will save your fingers some pain since you have to poke through so many layers, so I encourage this purchase.  I don’t have a thimble and I definitely struggled.

15. Using the hole you just poked from the BACK, use the button threaded needle and go through that hole to the BACK of the headboard… bringing the tail of the thread with you.

As a side note,  at this point it is helpful to have another person to help push the button tufts to the depth of your choosing, but not always necessary.

16.  Grab one of those cheapy buttons and thread the tails of the embroidery thread through the button holes.  Tie the threads off as tight as you want to produce the tuft.  Repeat this for all the button holes.  Voila!  You’re done with that part!

For the legs of the headboard, we used the scraps from the plywood cuttings to build up the back in order to lay some cut-at-the-store 1×4′s flush with the batting/eggcrate/fabric layer.  We screwed all of that in place with 3/4″ screws in randomly pre-drilled holes.

We did not attach the headboard to our bed frame because we didn’t want to deal with measuring.  We don’t have hardwood floors, so our bed doesn’t move.  We just leaned the headboard onto the wall and scooted the bed up against it.  Our bed is monsterously heavy (it’s a tempur-pedic mattress, which weighs ~200 lbs including the “box springs”), so we weren’t worried about it toppling over on us in the middle of the night.

I hope that helps!  Leave comments if you have any questions and hopefully I can answer them.  :)