Bright As A Button (An Easy Way To Upgrade A Boring Sofa)

Always ones to add a pop of colour, our latest upgrade involves a little upgrade of our sofa in the living room.

Can you see what we’ve done?

When we first moved into our new home, we had absolutely no furniture. Our amazing friends Gill and Steve kindly gave us two armchairs, we made a makeshift table out of part of our garden table and balanced the TV on a few boxes. That was pretty much all we had for the first few months.

Looking back, it’s hard to believe that our living room used to look like this

We had no fridge for the first two weeks and had to drink our New-House-Celebration-Champagne out of an ice-cooled cleaning bucket. So glamorous!

When we had our first overnight visitors, we decided that we couldn’t make them sit on the floor for two weeks, so bought this Florence Knoll style sofa.

I’d really been looking for something in grey, possibly suede, but in the end Jan and I (taking our non-existent budget into account) decided on this one.

It’s so inferior compared to the quality of our original Eames Lounge Chair. But who are we kidding, there are about a million house related projects to complete before we would ever have the budget for an original and even then I’m pretty sure we’d have more important things to spend that amount of cash on.

Now, if this was an original we’d never have even considered this little upgrade, but as it was a reasonably cheap sofa we felt that we could justify having a bit of a play around.

I’d never been completely comfortable with the solid blackness of it. It’s kind of like the black hole of the room and just a bit too masculine for my taste.

Well, no more! We’ve added some colour by covering the buttons.

The colourful buttons really divide the large black area everything feeling much more light and more in keeping with our style (if we have one) and it really adds such a pop of colour and vibrancy.

I love the brightness and fun it adds to it. I think that Jan though I’d completely lost my mind. After covering the first two or three buttons, but after finishing the first half you can see what a difference it already made.

And now seeing it all work together, we’re both really happy with the result.

We probably used a completely Christine & Jan style made up way of covering buttons. We didn’t want to remove the buttons (we weren’t sure if we’d be able to attach them again) so that I basically sewed little socks to cover them. It was a bit fiddly, but our method actually worked really well.

What you will need:

• Ribbon in different colours (you could of course use fabric remnants, but as we had none we decided that it would be cheaper for use to purchase bits of ribbon instead)
• Scissors
• Nylon Thread
• Needle

How to do it:

1. Cut of a piece of the ribbon to cover the button. It should be large enough to completely cover the top and wrap around the bottom.

2. With the nylon thread, stitch a circle (using a running stitch) onto the ribbon. Again it should be approximately twice the size of the button you want to cover.

3. Trim away any excess ribbon, leaving a generous edge so that the ribbon wont fray.

4. This is the fiddly bit. Place your stitched ribbon circle onto the button and work your way around, pushing the ribbon under the button as you go.

5. Holding the button in place (so that you don’t snap it off) pull on the nylon thread so that the ribbon tightens under the button and pulls the fabric taught.

6. That’s basically it. Add a knot and snip off any excess nylon thread.

Done. A fun upgraded version of our plain black sofa.

I still can’t get over the amount of colour and interest our little diy sofa upgrade has added. Although the buttons are really small, they have a huge impact on the sofa.

The sofa is smooth, slightly shiny black leather, so we chose grosgrain ribbon to give a slight difference in texture. It’s still smoothish, but just adds a tiny bit of extra interest.

The coloured buttons really break up the fairly large black area and add a real fun element.

Are we completely mad? Maybe, but we really love it.  Do you update and personalise your furniture?