How To Paint Velvet Upholstery

Back in march I picked up these vintage pink velvet chairs on craigslist. I had high hopes for them as they had such good bones. Cane chairs are my ultimate favourite style of vintage chairs  and a lot of high end designers get them reupholstered and painted. Well, I didn’t have that kind of budget because reupholstery can cost upwards of 500 a chair, or more. So I set out to google different methods of painting upholstery.

I found a lot of tutorials on painting different types of cotton, and other similar materials but couldn’t find a lot on velvet. One tutorial said to paint the chair with water first or spray the material before beginning and below I’ll explain on why that step isn’t really important.

Here are the chairs to begin with

How To Paint Velvet Upholstery

I’m sorry for the awful before photo. I didn’t really plan on blogging the transformation until I decided I needed to because there wasn’t a lot of coverage on  painting velvet upholstery.

I basically started off with painting the chair seat with water. I read somewhere that this is beneficial and I highly discourage it. Not only is my seat taking WAY longer than the back of the chair to dry, but it will need additional coats as the paint sunk in too far. This might be a great method on a cotton chair as you are basically dying the chair fabric, but for velvet I found that just simply painting straight away worked better.

I’m trying  “Chalked” by Rust-Oleum in Aged Grey. We kind of have a grey thing and Glen specifically picked out this color to redo our chairs in.

This 887 ML Can cost me $22.00 and the color, consistency and coverage is actually pretty nice. I’ve used quite a few other chalk paints before and it fits the bill nicely. Plus the color is so dreamy.

I’ve read quite a few tutorials who stated you need to spritz or paint your material with water prior to painting it. Well, don’t. I’m so much happier with how the backing of my chair has turned out after one coat than the seat. The seat is the part of the chair I painted with water prior to starting.

Painting upholstery does take longer to dry so if you can put this in a breezy place to wait it out I would suggest that. We have ours out in a shaded area on our deck.

Here’s a shot mid first coat, as you can tell the coverage is amazing.

As you can see, the seat of the chair is a lot more pink than the back of the chair. So don’t use water folks, it will just prolong this project by a few hours.

Here’s the chair with the first coat of chalk paint on – some may choose to just leave it as is. But I want it to be a bit more grey, as you can see it looks slightly purple.

After throwing one more coat of paint on the chairs, here’s how they turned out.

Would I ever paint upholstery again? Yes, but not for a good while. I only had enough time today to paint one of my chairs and it is a lot more work than painting wood.

What was the cost of this project? $ 27 dollars ( Paint + Brush )

Good luck on your next DIY!