Project #3 Upholstered Headboard

It had been bothering me for quite a while that there was no headboard to our guest bedroom bed.  The space just felt incomplete and bare.  The guest bedroom felt more like an office that happened to have a bed in it instead of a bedroom that happened to have a desk in it.  I had been thinking of different things we could use as a headboard in the bedroom but I really wanted to make one.  I convinced Philip that it would be a great idea and after much work and a little bit of money we completed our upholstered headboard project!  

Here is our Fabric!

Here we are after stapling the mattress pad and about
to start stapling the fabric.

First we had to decide how large to make the headboard.  We made it to fit a queen size bed even though the bed in our guest room is only a full size bed.  I wanted to keep our options open whenever we move or if we ever get a new bed.  We purchased a piece of plywood at Lowes and had them cut it down to the size we wanted.  We had an adventure trying to get this HUGE piece of plywood back to our house.  We managed to fit it in the car with the seats down but couldn't close the trunk.  This normally would have been fine but it was just a little cold riding with the trunk open since it was snowing as we were driving home :)

Making an upholstered headboard requires plywood, upholstery foam, batting, fabric, hot glue and a staple gun.  Upholstery foam is VERY expensive so we saved money by buying an egg crate mattress and putting the egg crate side down.  We also used an old mattress pad as batting which I think ended up making it sturdier and saved us more cash :)

Here is a closer view of stapled
mattress pad.

We picked out fabric at JoAnn Fabrics and I was SO excited about it! I LOVE the fabric!  It was not wide enough to cover the width of the headboard so I had to sew some on to each side and make sure the stripes repeated correctly.  After finally finishing sewing we could assemble the headboard! 


We hot glued the egg crate mattress to the headboard and cut off the excess.  We then wrapped the mattress cover around the foam and plywood and stapled it to the back.  Then we wrapped the fabric around the headboard and stapled it to the back.  We had to make sure the fabric lined up correctly with the headboard sides because we didn't want crooked stripes going up the headboard :)  

It turned out great and we are so excited to have visitors come stay in our guest bedroom!!

Finally Completed :)