Custom Jeans

Ok, so it's been a while. I told you I'm terrible at this. I still will try to do better at posting more often. 

I have had so much fun designing these jeans for Ms. Jodi again. 

We did three pairs this time. So I thought I would share the process a bit. 

I start out with my Accucut Die Cutter. I have had it since 2002 and it works great! I have a ton of different dies from geometric shapes to lamas. I'll provide a link to the company at the bottom of my post. 

Here is my closet of dies..

Anyway, on to the designs. The first pair she wanted just squares of light colorful fabrics going down the sides. I split the seam on the outside of the pants so I can sew the squares on. (note: I would open the inside seam but on many jeans it's sewn differently and is really hard to sew back the same way.   There have been tears and swear words.)

However, the next two jeans have an inside seam that is easy to sew back up. So those are done differently. 

Here is the white jeans all sewed up. 

 

She likes it to be a little frayed on the ends. I think they look pretty nice. Just a note, my pictures of the fabrics are brighter than real life. 

So on to the next pair. 

These were fun to do. I cut out three birds. Each fabric had Seam a Seam on the backside to hold everything down.  One grey, one red and one black. I cut each part off to make one robin. So I cut off the red belly, the black head and left the grey in one piece. Added a grey wing and sewed everything down. 
I then my favorite die is the vine. It's one of my go to dies. I added the birds and some purple berries. What do you think? These I split the inside seam so I could do the design on the side better. 

Last but not least is this pair. 

I make large patches for jeans and whatever. Like this...

My customer loved them but thought they were too big for her. (she is tiny!!). So asked me to make some really small ones in the same way. So this is what she got. They are 2 inches across.

While I love making these. I don't have a die for a smaller flower like this. So each is hand cut out. She also loves dots. So I made up a few little 1 inch circles on denim. 

I had a really cool die of a branch so appliqued that along the outside first. 

Next was the leaves.

And lastly the flowers and dots. 

These are just laid out to make sure I like the design. Here is a closeup of the design. 

All finished! 

What do you think! I have fun designing these for Jodi. 

A little shout out to her artwork. She will be in a gallery showing. Here are a few of her pieces. (Do you think she likes dots?)

If you live in the New York area, this is in Brooklyn. www.theotherartfair.com/brooklyn/

Hope enjoyed my jeans creations. Want a pair of your own? Check out my next post.

Here is a link to Accucut if you would like to check it out. Wonderful company with quality products. 

Accucut Die Cutter and Dies

Until next time! 

Bunny

Blue Jean Upcycle Part Deux

So, I got the waistband covered. I broke two size 100 needles to do it. It gets a bit thick along the seam line. I dropped the feed dogs and used my darning food to messy sew everything on.

I sewed the belt loops back on. Not to bad if I say so myself. 

Next I appliquéd the flower and other embellishments. I still had my darning foot on. Here is a picture of the starting point.

...and the finished flower. By the way, big flowers like this one are great ways to learn and practice free form sewing.

I added a little bird from one of my favorite fabrics. 

The back needed a little something too. I thought some vines would work nicely. I of course used my Accucut to cut out the vines.

Here is the finished product! 

Front...

Back...

I still want to through it in the wash and see if everything holds up. I have a pile of jeans and guess what I'm doing tonight??? Yep, seam ripping the side seams. I have plans for tomorrow! 

Until later!! 

Cheers.

Blue Jeans Upcycle...A work in progress

Being a child of the 60's patched blue jeans are nothing new to me. I use to sew all kinds of stuff on my jeans. Crochet flowers were my go to most of the time. Oh, I was soooo cool.

Fast forward many years.... I'm needing some new inspiration. I keep hearing from family and friends that I need to do patchwork jeans. Ok, I get the message!  After a bit on Pinterest for inspiration I came up with these. I LOVE the waistband.

I couldn't find a good source to credit for the picture. So all I can do is say, check out the thread on Pinterest and maybe you can find the original source. I could not. So sorry who ever you are... but your jeans are AWESOME.

So here is where I begin...

 Boxes and baskets filled with fabrics some with Wonder-under already ironed on, some not. I dump everything out and start looking for cool stuff.

I used my seam ripper to cut the outside leg seams. That way I can use my sewing machine to sew everything down and sew it back up again with no one knowing the difference!

I found this really awesome flower from a Kaffe Fassett fabric I had cut out long time ago. It was so big I just couldn't decide how to use it. These jeans begged me for it. Yes, the clothes do talk to me. They can be so bossy!

I ironed it on the front of one pant leg.

I'm still working on what other things to add. But this is my base inspiration.

So I also needed to deal with the waistband. That was my favorite part of the Pinterest jeans.

A bit of un-stitching was in order. I needed the belt-loops to get out of the way! So I used my seam ripper to cut the threads on the top part of the belt-loop only. I kept the bottom so I could just sew the top back up without having to try to figure out where it use to be.
Now for the fun part. I measured the waistband and cut pieces of fabric a little longer than needed. ( I'll cut it down later. They all had Wonder-under on them so I ironed them down the best I could.

Note: I used a Teflon ironing sheet to keep the sticky stuff from getting on my ironing board.

I will messy sew them down later..... To Be Continued.....