How to Upholster a Headboard with Blue Jeans

When I bought a padded, queen-size headboard from Foamforyou (Foam N More Upholstery Inc) on eBay, I wanted to upholster it cheaply. Being fond of denim, and having blue curtains in the bedroom, I decided to use make a blue jean headboard.

The jeans were free. I asked on Freecycle if anyone had any jeans that weren't fit to wear, and a lovely person gave me a big bundle of long old jeans, in a couple of different shades of blue. I laid them out on my dining room table.

I planned to place the jeans vertically, using whole legs, side seams intact, at the ends of the headboard. In the middle, I set up symmetric dark and light stripes of different jeans legs. I cut the jeans apart on the seams - I tried ripping the seams, but decided just to cut next to the seam lines. And I cut all the way up and through the waistband, to make sure the pieces were long enough. (I did use a couple of front halves of jeans legs, and for those, I sewed the side pockets closed to make them stronger.) I used the narrow leg ends of the jeans at the top of my headboard.

(Those heavy jeans seams got knotted together to make a long rope, just because I felt like it - we'll use it to tie up our cardboard for recycling.)

Then I seamed the jeans legs together on the sewing machine, one at a time, checking carefully between seams. (I have to do everything that way, because I'm spatially challenged or something.) I kept the foot ends of the legs approximately level, and let the waistbands hang as long as they were. I drew lines with a long ruler for the seams, because I wanted them to be parallel, but you could do seams at angles, too.

When the sewing was done, I arranged the denim over the headboard, lay the headboard face down on the table, and stapled the jeans in place with a staple gun, pulling tight.

One jeans leg was a little short, and a bit of a hip pocket showed, but that's well below the level of the mattress, so you can't see it.

When the stapling was done, I cut off the excess material at the headboard sides and bottom.

I really like my upholstered headboard, and am thinking of investing in a can of Scotchguard rather than slipcovering it!