If your sofa is starting to look a little rough in some areas due to pilling, here’s an easy trick to make it look almost as good as new again. Here’s how to remove pills from upholstery fabric.
I’ll start off by saying that if you really choose the right high-quality fabric for your furniture, one that suits your family’s needs and patterns of use, you shouldn’t really have much of a problem with pilling fabric. It happens though, for one reason or another and luckily there’s a quick way to deal with it. We got a new set of sofas for the living room last year and we’ve started to see some pilling on the fabric now, after lots of daily use. This is our in-between living room furniture, where our kids are still young enough to possibly make a mess of it, but we know that soon we’ll be able to have a little bit “nicer” furniture in here without having to worry about it getting ruined. So this set is just pretty for now, but it’s not the highest quality because we know it will only be here for a couple of years. I know a lot of other people are in the same position furniture-wise, so if you’ve got pilling, here’s how to remove pills from upholstery fabric!
Tools Needed to Remove Pills From Upholstery Fabric
There are a couple of different methods that you can use. For the first method, you’ll need:
- A cashmere comb
- A rubber glove or pet fur remover
The second method involves using a sweater shaver, which I’ll talk more about in a moment.
Pictured Above: Washable Rug | Coffee Table | Cream Velvet Curtains
How to Use a Cashmere Comb to Remove Pills From a Couch
Using a cashmere comb might take a bit of time, but I love this little tool because it’s so satisfying to use and it’s just such a simple and elegant solution that takes up virtually no space in your cleaning supply cupboard.
Simply “comb” the cashmere comb over the area of the fabric where you see the pilling happening and you’ll start to see them collect on the edge of the comb.
If you have a lot of pilling, some of the pills will be removed, but might not be picked up by the comb and this is where the pet fur remover comes in. Run it over the section that you just de-pilled to pick everything up. This is a great step to give you a really nice, clean finished product and also allows you to clearly see any pills that you missed with the comb.
How to Use a Sweater Shaver to Remove Pills From Upholstery Fabric
Using a sweater shaver is a bit of a quicker process because you just run it over the fabric and simply shave all the pills off. The pills and fuzz that you remove will then be collected in the shaver itself and you can just empty it out when you’re done.
Sweater shavers can be adjusted so that the cutting blade is closer or further away from the surface of the fabric you’re working on. Definitely start with the setting where the blade is furthest away to avoid accidentally cutting any holes in the fabric of your sofa if you’re going to use this method instead of the cashmere comb.
Do you have another method to remove pills that has worked well for you? Is there another handy tool for this job that I haven’t seen yet?
MORE IDEAS LIKE THIS
- How to Fix Stretched Succulents
- 12 Homekeeping Tools That Will Change Your Life
- How to Wash a Ruggable
- How to Clean Silpat Baking Mats
- 8 Things You Can Clean With Baking Soda
- The Creek Line House Cleaning Archives
This post contains affiliate links.
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.