A year ago I bought a boring red ottoman at a yard sale for $5.

Snore.  But lovely legs, don’t you think?

I get my fur from Mary Jo’s Cloth Store. This is the same fur I used to make the fur wreath years ago. It looks luxurious and the hair is long~the longer the hair, the more forgiving the fur when it comes to hiding seams. This fur was $13.99 a yard and I only used about half a yard.  In the store I don’t remember seeing as many $13 a yard whiteish furs but online there are many, my receipt doesn’t say which fur I bought, so sorry. Why do I insist on doing projects and not recording exact sources?

This project was stress free and pure fun because if it didn’t work out, I only lost $5 for an ottoman that had been sitting around, and $7 for half a yard of fur. TOTALLY worth the risk of it looking hideous.

First, I lined up the edge of the fur with the long edge of my ottoman. See how I’m holding the hair part up? When I let it drop, it comes down an inch or so past the cut mark, simply because of the length of the hair. Once you have it in place you can just fold it up over the top to expose the ugly fabric.  Then…

You guessed it.  I used a heavy duty super hot burn your hand to smithereens glue gun. Just run a strand of molten hot boiling liquid glue along the edge of the ottoman. And then plop your fur back down and press down to attach it. Let it cool for about a minute or less if you are impatient.

{I turned the ottoman 90 degrees to get better photos}

Don’t worry about the sides right now, just work your way up the front edge and then over the top. Fold back, glue, press down, fold back….

Don’t worry about doing it all perfect. Just work fast and get you some hot glue on there and then move right along. You don’t have to slather it everywhere, as long as it’s enough to hold you are good. The up side about using a high heat glue gun is that the hold is much stronger than low melt/heat glue guns. It’s worth almost maiming your hands for.

This is not how I hold the scissors~just the only way I could get a photo. It is easier to cut fur from the back side. Make sure to slip your scissors in under the furry side close to the backing so that you don’t chop off all the long hair. You need that part.

OH NO!!!!!  I made a mistake, I cut the fur too short, I have failed!

No worries, that is why we are using fur, just pat the fur down and you’ll never see it.

See? You can’t even tell.  Now go ahead and glue down the side, do the same with the other two sides and we’ll talk about these corners.

You’ll end up with these poofs on each corner.

Cut a slit right up the middle.

Then take one side and cut straight up. You’ll end up cutting off a little triangle shape.  Do that for each part.

This is what it should look like. And you simply put a little glue in there and then mess up the fur and the seam disappears.

Isn’t fur amazing? Hides the seams like they don’t exist.

It doesn’t look like that big of a mess but trust me, fur was flying everywhere. After you glue everything down, it’s good to vacuum the ottoman and the floor and yourself.

Naturally, I like it in every room of our house.

And depending on your mood you can make it more like Ty Pennington or slicked back like Kourtney Kardashian’s boyfriend.

fur ottoman

I didn’t make a fur ottoman because I had been dreaming of a fur ottoman. I made one because I had the ottoman already but I hated the fabric. I could have slipcovered it but, I wanted something daring, fun, super easy and different.  Fur just seemed like an interesting choice. I wasn’t sure I could dislike it any more than I already did, so it was worth ruining.

I bet you have something sitting around in your home that you don’t love. Is there a little risk you can take to see if you can make it better? What’s the worst that can happen?

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