Paint Spills and Flower Patches

After months of fiddling, I came up with an easy fix for a stained velvet tuffet

Tuffets are one of the world’s great inventions. They are good for your foot health, improve the sitting comfort of any chair, and look fabulous while doing both. In my opinion, the tuffet’s many sterling features were worked into later innovations, from recliner chairs to pedicure thrones. It’s OK; tuffets’ software has been and always will be open source.

I’ve been hanging around tuffets for a few years now, since they are an important part of most shed décor schemes. I love them fiercely. This poses a problem, as I don’t like to sully them with my dirty feet (although I do) and unfortunately I lean towards the dainty kind. Like this one.

I found it at the Rose Bowl Flea Market; the needlepoint seat was in pretty good shape, but the rest needed a little update. I added the pom pom trim and painted the legs a linen color. Within weeks of tagging it my former shop, the little footstool found its new home.

About that paint spill …

Which brings us to an exquisite tufted gray velvet footstool that for some inexplicable reason hung around the She Shed Living shop and office for several years. Reasonably priced and suitable for many room palettes and styles, the poor thing just sat there. Over time, I fell in love with it and so was appalled one day to find that some oaf had dribbled paint on it.

Ugh. The Cherry Blossom shade is really cute (from our She Shades line of chalk-based paints) but didn’t do anything for the soft gray velvet or the blue-and-white tassel fringe.

Not sellable, of course. I tried halfheartedly to scrape some of the paint off the velvet but it was useless.

When we dissolved our partnership and closed up the shop, my partner graciously allowed me to take this piece home. For a few weeks I pondered how to treat the stains. A patch? New trim? Felt pens in 3 colors? Nothing quite stuck, until I started googling “appliqués.”

Appliqués have been around forever. It’s pretty much adhering one small piece of fabric upon another larger one. Think about your girl scout sash with its growing crop of merit badges (mine didn’t grow very lush and was abruptly halted at the age of 10, but that’s another story). Anyway, those cute patches on jeans, backpacks, and quilts are all appliqués. They enhance design and add a subtle dimensionality. They are also very useful as camouflage, which is where my project lies.

How I Transformed the Tuffet

The first thing I did was head to Etsy. Initially I thought about picking up the blue in the trim but eventually moved into a tone-on-tone quest. You can actually make your own appliqués very easily from fabric. Simply cut out the designs you want and apply them to the larger piece you are decorating.

These pretty gray flowers appealed to me. They are subtle but opaque enough to give decent stain coverage. I purchased five of them and ended up using just three (more on why later). I used upholstery-grade thread and a standard needle. The curved upholstery needle I thought I needed was a bitch to learn and didn’t penetrate the velvet very well.

Before applying the flowers I cleaned up the trim. The only thing I could think of was to carefully snip off the paint-encrusted threads. It made the short looped fringe you see at the edge of the braid a bit threadbare but overall I was satisfied with the results. There may be a paint remover solution out there (tell me what it is in the comments!) but I was on a mission and just used my scissors.

I placed two flowers overlapping each other on diagonal corners of the footstool’s top, with a single flower right in the center. Once the first two flowers were pinned in place, I used a blanket stitch to attach the flowers around their edges. It might have been cool to use blue stitching here, to pick up the trim.

I started with the stained corner. You can see that the flowers covered nearly all the egregious pink. From a reasonable distance it virtually disappears.

The appliquéing had to be resumed the next day so I left the project without pinning the rest of the flowers. That was a mistake.

When I returned the next morning, two of the three remaining flowers had vanished. They were nowhere to be found. I spent an hour searching through the house, pulled out my pine chest and shined a flashlight under every possible hiding place. My two Siamese cats watched me with mild interest.

Doggedly moving on, I played around with a different design. My single remaining flower was positioned in various places until it looked right at home at a slight distance from the other two. I didn’t need symmetry like I thought I did. The decision was good and it was liberating; the ability to change course and try something different in the middle of a project will serve you well. Especially if you have cats.

The missing flowers were discovered a day later lying innocently on the bathroom rug. They are now in my trims box awaiting another project.

All hail the versatile appliqué! I am very happy with my retooled footstool. Here’s to putting your feet up at the end of a long day, whether it’s a recliner or a velvet tuffet.