Brushing Out Fake Fur Pillows, Car Seat Covers or Chairs - Like New

I had a friend over for the past week. She got sick and stayed for a few days and then we visited for another few days before she left today. 

My couch pillows were looking quite mangy with little thread strings, lint, hair etc stuck on the fake fur. My friend said it was time to recover them and I told her I just needed to brush them out. She said it wouldn't work. 

I have had the pillows for about five years now. In that time, I brushed out the pillows once and they looked almost new. Because of the "Fake fur" they get things caught in them, especially when I am sewing something on the couches. The hand-print quilts were especially bad for them as the little strings got all over the pillows. (See the post about the quilts here: Post 1. Post 2. Post 3. Post 4. Post 5. Those posts are the technical issues and if you want to see the quilts that got better and better with each quilt, type in "quilt", or "hand-print" or "memory quilt" in the search box at the bottom of the page and you can see all the quilts with the girls holding them. There are a few t-shirt quilts in there as well that came out quite cute if you haven't seen them.

So, today after my friend left, I decided to catch up on my mending and brush the pillows out. I had a very bad headache today and was hoping I would feel better but after three doses of pills and a large amount of Coke, I didn't feel much better so sitting on the couch was my best option. 

It made a huge dusty/linty mess but they look so much better. I have also used this method on car seat covers that I used to cover our banana seats. It works well. The girls have had a few brightly colored fur pillows in the past on their beds and the same thing works for those as well. 

I tried to blow up the larger pillows pictures so you could see the matted mess on the last picture but you really can't see it that well. Trust me when I say they were rough and matted and not nice looking. You can use this method after washing them also.

Make sure that you use a soft or natural bristle brush. If you use a hard brush it will pull out the fake fur or put holes in the fabric. 

Now the pillows are soft and cozy again. I should have done it sooner but as you know if you read this, my life has been occupied with other life events and this hasn't been a priority. It was actually nice to be able to get to something like that done today. I also got all the girls to bring me their items needing mending and finished all those as well.

Oh how I love to get things checked off my "To do" list.