We love our couch, but...

We've had the couch for almost 10 years and we love it.  It was our first leather couch and it's uber comfortable, but one cushion in particular has been a mess for a while.  As it started to break down I painstakingly stitched up each tear and it looked rather charming.  That only lasted so long.  Soon it wore down beyond a small stitch repair.

Ugh.

I've been trying to figure out how to fix this eyesore and I finally had a plan.  This couch won't leave our living room until it's on it's last leg, so I decided to steal some of the leather from the back and use some heavy duty snaps to secure it over the damaged area.  First, I had to pull the couch from the wall and clean up underneath it.  Oh.my.word.  Among the dust bunny disaster beneath it all were 11 matchbox cars, 6 board books, 4 balls, 31 assorted toys, 3 dog bones, and 9 potato head pieces.  This might've been funny if I hadn't just pulled the couch out in January and mopped the floors.  

After spending a good amount of time cleaning up, I attacked the back of the couch with my exacto knife.  I don't know what I was expecting, but it was as easy as slicing through butter!

The plan was to use the heavy duty snaps to adhere this pristine piece of leather onto the worn out piece that was out of control.

I got all the tools ready, and even attempted the first snap, but it quickly became apparent that without a solid surface under the cushion there was no way I could crimp the two pieces together to create the bottom half of the snap.  Then I was stuck.  I had already cut the damaged leather off of the cushion and created a huge gaping foam spot on the back of my couch.

Thankfully I had a good supply of needles and went the sewing route.

I placed the good piece of leather under the cut out cushion part and ever so slowly forced the needle through both layers of leather.  I used the needle nose pliers to push the needle through and then used them to pull it the rest of the way through.  I broke 6 of my heavy duty upholstery needles with my method, but I don't think I could have asked for a better result.  It surprised me how much the couch has faded over the years!