DIY: IKEA Ektorp Sofa Makeover
It could be the influence of hashtag Millennial Pink, of course. Or this Kate Spade ad from a couple of years ago. Or the huge flamingo trend of the last two years or so, which I have been more than swept up in (to date I have: 2 x cushions with flamingos on, flamingo fairy lights, flamingo Christmas baubles, a gold statue of a flamingo, flamingo wallpaper, a flamingo hook, several flamingo notebooks, a flamingo scarf...)
Whatever it is or was, pink and I are most definitely in the middle of our honeymoon phase right now. Not all shades give me the same thrill of joy - it pays to be a little picky, darling - but petal pinks, coral pinks, hot pinks, blue pinks... I could go on. They are all fun and fabulous and I am Here. For. Them.
Which means that my house is Here. For. Them., too. Most recently here for pink? Our slightly worn-out looking good old IKEA Ektorp three-seat sofa:
Ah, the Ektorp. An IKEA staple, in league with the Poäng chair and that green stuffed snake everyone and their mother had back in the day. You know the one I mean. This one came courtesy of Alex's dad, who kindly gifted us a slew of furniture from his old house, and was in fine shape - it just felt a bit tired. NOW, however...
Well, it's certainly not tired any more!
Yep, I dyed the sofa pink. A fairly bright pink, too, although I have to say it looked a lot, lot brighter when it was first dyed - think if a highlighter and a neon sign had a baby. In situ in the living room, with the cushions and the lovely blue walls, it actually fits in pretty well.
Want to know how I brought this monstrosity to life? Read on...
Failures First
Oh, you thought that the above is the result of my first attempt at this? Hahahaha NO. I originally tried to dye the browny-beige covers that we already had, thinking that they were light enough to take the colour. The result? A pinkish (heavy on the ish, light on the pink) brownish-beige set of sofa covers. After a little digging through the interwebs, I realised that:
- Not all sofa covers are created equally! Our original covers were probably these ones, which are a mix of polyester and other things, which the dye we used (Dylon machine pods) can't actually stick to. The ones above are these covers, which are 100% cotton
- READING THE INSTRUCTIONS - P R O P E R L Y - HELPS.
Not only would this have helped me with the cover issue, but I also would have realised that the original amount of dye I bought was way, way less than I needed
Getting Your Dye Right
As I said, we used Dylon machine dye pod things for this project, mainly because I don't really know of any other fabric dye options in the UK - they seem to have the monopoly!
This colour is is called Peony Pink, chosen partially because it was the lighter of the two pinks they had on offer, and partially because the whole reason I decided that the sofa would be pinkified was because of this photo:
I've always enjoyed certain shades of navy and pink together - as my Mum would say, it looks 'very French' - and I'd been planning to do something with the sofa for a while, but I wasn't sure exactly what. Having more dark blue in the room felt like it would be an error, and I toyed with doing a rich green (I dream of emerald velvet chaises...), but when I saw how much just having a bunch of bright flowers in the corner did for the room I decided that it didn't need any more dark/jewel tones - it needed pinkness.
Now, I'm no horticulturalist but I'm fairly sure that the shade we ended up with isn't one naturally found in the peonies of the world, which is fine because I still think it looks pretty fab.
Once you've picked your shade, you need to Do The Maths, which I did not enjoy.
Basically, one pod will do 600g of fabric to full colour, 1.2kg to a paler version. This is important and useful information to know. And an important and useful tip to go along? Don't try to guess how much something weighs! The instructions say that 1.2kg of fabric is about the same as a double duvet cover, so we decided that the main cover for the body of the sofa was about the same as that, and all six cushion covers were too, so we bought four pods of dye (two for the cushions, two for the rest). THIS WAS COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY WRONG.
The entire lot - cushion covers and carcass cover combined - is about 5½-6kg. So no wonder that, when I tried to dye maybe 3kg of cushion covers with 1.2kg worth of dye, nothing really happened, regardless of the fact that the material was wrong.
On our second go round, having bought the new white cotton covers (we decided this was the safest bet to make sure it actually worked this time), we played it super safe and ordered no fewer than twelve pods of dye. SIDENOTE: this is not a cheap DIY (though it is cheaper than buying a new sofa!), so enter at your own risk!
Oh also, when you use multiple pods of dye, you're meant to empty them directly into the washing machine, not just put them all in together as if it was one pod. The more you know, eh?
We ended up doing the dyeing in three goes: 2 x three cushion covers, and the carcass cover, with three pods' worth of dye per load (this is maybe why the cushions are slightly brighter than the rest of the cover - we maybe should have done an extra one for that). I won't bore you with the details of how you use the dye because the instructions come with it, but it's super simple once you actually, you know, read and follow them instead of blundering blindly ahead with nothing but hopes and dreams and completely unfounded confidence in your own ability.
You're a smart person, so you've probably noticed that changing the colour isn't all I did to the sofa. I also got its ankles out, like some sort of Victorian pervert.
I have a real thing about furniture that sits fully on the floor, and I don't know why. Not to get too airy fairy on you, but it just feels wrong, energy-wise, to me - as if something is being blocked (this may be the result of me getting a little bit obsessed with an old 80's Feng Shui book of my Mum's I found when I was about 10, which magically disappeared one day after I insisted we hung windchimes in every corner of the house and which my family deny all knowledge of to this day). Plus I just don't like how it looks; all I can think of - especially with sofas and beds where it's material that's hanging onto the floor - is the city of dust, pennies and lost biros collecting under there. Ugh.
So, I decided that the Ektorp needed to lose its skirt and bare its pegs.
Only... well, not to body-shame, but it did not have pretty legs.
See those big, blocky black plastic things? Not my cup of tea, I'm afraid!
Lucky for me, I'd found these little beauties in my favourite section of IKEA, bargain corner (later to be the scene of our epic showdown over the footstool) for only £7 months ago and was saving them just for this makeover:
There were a ton of them at the time and I'm a little bit annoyed that I didn't pick up another pack so that we could have had matching legs on both sofas in there, but c'est la vie - they're all gone now!
Changing the legs was pretty easy - I just tipped the sofa onto it's back, and - once I had confirmed that I need a screwdriver to remove the old legs (tip: if you didn't put the legs on in the first place, try and check with whoever did what the process was rather than try unsuccesfully for ten minutes to spin a screwed-on leg off your sofa) - got them off in a jiffy:
As you can see, I'd already put the base cover on (yeah, let's see how many different terms I can come up with for whatever that piece of material is in one post).
And... this is where it gets tricky. Ish.
Tucking the excess cover underneath the sofa - so that the legs would be on display - wasn't difficult exactly, but it was a bit fiddly. I'll do my best to explain my methods to you:
I decided that, rather than try to get the fabric to go around the legs at the corners, I needed to put the legs on over the cover - this would also be extra security to keep the cover attached to the base, rather than drooping to the floor.
Above is one of the corners - you can see that it's pleated, because of the way it's designed to hang. Folding that much fabric up looked a bit bulky, and it was difficult to get the leg to attach over the top, so on each corner I cut out the central triangle in the pleat:
Once I'd done this, I put the screw from the original legs back in so that I knew where the holes for the new legs needed to be, and cut a slit in the fabric:
I then attached the fabric to the base of the sofa using my new favourite toy, the staple gun!
Then, I repeated the same steps with the other corner of fabric. I ended up cutting a square off the bottom of each remaining triangle in the pleat (in the box, below) too, again to avoid too much fabric bulking up:
Once I had everything tucked and stapled, I screwed the new leg on through the holes in the cover
After doing this on all four corners, I stapled the rest of the lose cover to the edges of the base:
Two rows on each edge - one directly into the wooden base of the sofa (the one closest to edge), and the second for neatness, to keep the edges from flapping.
Tipped it back the right way up, et voilà! One bright pink, slightly mid-century looking brand-spanking new sofa.
I am delighted with how this DIY/IKEA hack/makeover/whatever you want to call it turned out. Over the MOON. You know how sometimes you have a very clear idea in your head of how something will look, then you do it and it turns out to be a complete mess and nothing like what you imagined? Well, after my first attempt I thought this would be one of those times - but actually, it's pretty much exactly how I envisioned it. I'm so pleased with it!
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| Even Brokk's impressed! Ish |
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