Furniture Upholstery Repair

Furniture upholstery enhances your furniture and looks great in the right surroundings. However, furniture upholstery can soon become old and worn. Small tears can develop that need repair and rips can happen by accident. All of these things can be fixed at home and you don’t need a great deal of sewing experience in order to make satisfactory repairs.

Step 1 - Small Rip

You can sew the sides of a small rip together as long as it’s not in an area of the furniture upholstery that receives heavy use. For this, you’ll need to use upholstery thread that matches the upholstery, and an upholstery needle. Start sewing from the back of the upholstery. Use small stitches that are just long enough to hold the edges together so they won’t pull apart again. Pull each stitch tight before making the next one. When you’ve finished, knot the thread and cut close to the furniture upholstery fabric so there’s no loose thread remaining.

Step 2 - Tear

A tear on the seat of the furniture upholstery can be repaired with a patch. You will need to cut the patch to an appropriate size for the tear. It should be a little larger than the tear on all sides. Slide it under the tear with the adhesive side up.

Use a hot iron on the fabric on one side of the tear so that the patch adheres hard to the fabric. Now, pull the other part of the tear tight against the first and push down on it before using your iron on that part of the tear.

In many cases this will give an invisible repair. If the repair doesn’t seem too strong, you can make it stronger by using fabric adhesive on the tear.

Step 3 - Hole

If there’s a small hole in your furniture upholstery, you can fix this quite easily. First, trim away the edges of the hole with a pair of scissors then insert an iron-on patch into the hole with the adhesive side up. Iron into place.

Cut a small piece of fabric that fits into the existing design and cut it to the proper size and shape. You should be able to take it from an area that’s not usually in view. Match it up with the hole. Apply fabric adhesive to the back of the piece and put into place. Iron down and you will have an invisible repair.

Step 4 - Loose Upholstery

At times, upholstery can become loose on the frame of your chair or couch. This is usually because one or more of the tacks holding it in place has come out. This is very easy to fix. Inspect the fabric to see where the tack should have been and make sure you have tacks that match if they’re of the decorative type.

Bunch the fabric if necessary, making sure it matches the bunching elsewhere. Hammer the tack into place. When doing this, hammer all the other tacks down in case they’ve become loose as well.