
Paint on fabric dye
Really, y’all, we painted my couch this weekend. Here’s just how it turned out.
Y’all realize I’ve been dragging my foot on reupholstering this couch, right? Well, I finally realized the reason why I’ve been dragging my feet onto it.
I don’t love this settee.
After all, it is fine. I truly do love the English rolled hands, and I like that it offers a skirt. But that’s in which my love because of this couch ends up. I don’t enjoy how the back cushions look, and I also really don’t like chair cushions. So that the notion of spending hundreds of bucks on material and materials, and then investing several days of my time (and my mom’s time!) reupholstering this thing ended up being under thrilling if you ask me.
We started with this particular guide from Hyphen Interiors, after which read about Kristi’s experience here, and utilized their particular resources, made my very own tweaks to the process, and wound up right here.
It’s surely a short-term answer to my couch scenario, but i believe it looks quite darn good! Also it surely looks a heck of a lot better than this beast.

The process that I used is actually pretty effortless and simple. Here’s what I utilized:
- 1 gallon of latex paint in an eggshell finish (we used Behr paint in a color called stepping-stones from Home Depot, if I did it once more, I’d utilize flat paint)
(I didn’t use a complete gallon, however for a couch this dimensions, it will be calls for over a quart. And because the expense of two quarts is much more as compared to price of one gallon, i purchased the gallon.) - 8 8-oz bottles of Delta Fabric Medium
- Liquid
- Purdy paint brush (I utilized my favorite 2-inch XL-Cub)
- Scrap little bit of MDF (plywood or cardboard could have worked too)
- Drop cloth
- 220-grit sandpaper
And that is it!
Regarding the very first coat, we confusing my paint, textile medium, and liquid in a 2:2:1 proportion (2 components paint, 2 parts textile method, 1 component water). We mixed it together really well and began painting. And indeed, 1st layer seemed really terrible!
Now I did start-off utilizing a spray container full of water and saturating the fabric before painting like tutorial thought to do. But I only did that regarding the far kept portion of the rear, and you may note that it is the area where in actuality the paint covered minimal.
Regarding the middle area, I decided to forgo the squirt bottle (not merely because it ended up being messy and I didn’t see that it had been making most of a positive change, but since it might have doubled the time it took to paint this sofa!). the like the center area, I just painted and applied inside paint with my hand. You can view so it covered just a little better.
And from the correct part, I just painted it on. No spray container, and no rubbing the paint in with my hand. Only artwork. It nonetheless soaked in to the fabric really well, plus it had been a lot easier and means less time consuming. To ensure that’s the technique we utilized after that on out on the rest of the sofa.
I left that to dry for some hours, and then came back doing the 2nd layer.
The 2nd (and third and fourth) coating, I made the blend 1 part paint to at least one component textile method. I omitted water totally. In addition chose to lighten my paint, so I added some of my Polar Bear (the white on my trim) towards the paint I'd bought. So my combination was 1 cup of Stepping Stones, 1 cup of Polar Bear, and 2 cups of fabric medium.
Here’s how it taken care of the 2nd coat…
The second coat covered pretty well! I was just starting to think I would only need three coats, but We definitely needed four.

