How to Dye Leather Furniture

 

Recently, I began updating my husband's office. He works from home so I really wanted to create a nice environment for him that was masculine and timeless. Let me just tell you, it was BAD before I began working on it. He had a rickety desk with no drawers, a matching printer stand that wobbles every time he would print something, mismatched artwork, and a multi-color poster of the United States that looks like it belongs in a kid's room.

His current desk chair was given to us by a family friend, and was somehow missing a chunk on the armrest. It worked well for a while, as it is comfortable, but it was such an eye sore. With my current obsession with the decor from Patina Farm,  I really wanted to get him a great looking leather desk chair. They are so timeless and comfortable. My hope was to purchase a chair I found on Wayfair that had the perfect aged look to it. That was until I found this chair on Facebook for only $25...

This chair is 100% genuine leather, has a brass base, and is 40 years old. SCORE!

The picture on the internet made it look like the color was much more rich than it was in person. Although the color looks halfway decent in this picture, in person it was super outdated ('80s) and looked like the color of mud....not a good look.

The chair needed some love.

I started doing research and found that you can actually dye leather furniture. I couldn't find very many good tutorials on how to do it and one of the brands that many bloggers talked about from the past is no longer existent. Ergo, more research on my part.

There are 3 basic things you will need to dye a piece of furniture:

1) Deglazer (essentially this is acetone)

2) Leather dye

3) Sheen finish

My first task was to pick a color. I had a lot of anxiety over choosing the color because I didn't want the chair to be too dark. The swatches in the store were painted on a raw piece of hide, so how would it look on my already dark chair? The sales person suggested mixing two dyes together to achieve the color I wanted, but I ended up going with the color medium brown. Lucky for me, the dye remained true to color.

I am so happy I ended up going to a leather store instead of ordering them online because the colors looked so much different in person! 

For my project, I ended up only needing one, 4 oz bottle of the dye, one bottle of deglaze, and one bottle of the sheen.

Here's the chair mid-dye...looking pretty good if I do say so myself.

And the finished product!

HOW TO DYE LEATHER FURNITURE

Materials:

Deglazer or acetone

Leather dye (they come in 4 oz. and 32 oz., this project only used 4 oz.)

Sheen finish

Rags

Dye applicator (my brand came with one)

Drop sheet or paper

Rubber gloves

Instructions:

For my project, I wanted this chair to look like a true antique piece, so I distressed the chair before I dyed it. To simply dye the chair, start the video at 3:15 to see me select my dye color in the leather store. 

This video was taken from clips of my instagram stories while I was dyeing the chair. 

Better quality video DIYs to come ;)