Jeans + red wine

happy 2013! i decided to start off the new year with one of my favorite recente projects. flying back from boston last summer, my little charmer sent my dinner tray, complete with red wine, flying in the air (and all over me and our seats) not once, but twice. this very thoughtful gesture on his part left my jeans horribly stained all along one leg and with a bunch of spots on the other thigh. and not nice red stains, ugly brown ones. i mourned the loss of my favorite jeans for a few months, then after seeing this tutorial from awesomesauce & asshattery, i decided to do something similar with other jeans scraps.

and now my favorite jeans are even more favorite than before! (yes, i made the mistake of washing them before this picture with something red, so they’re slightly pink, but it went back to normal after a couple more washings.)

first i marked the stains with a delible sewing marker and then drew on curved lines, which would become the vines that would connect and cover the stains.

i cut the strips as long as possible from other jeans fabric and i started sewing them onto the lines. i used a straight stitch, but going over them twice, first along one edge and then along the other, so that they would stay more or less flat and keep them from fraying out of existence in the wash.

i wasn’t worried about sewing them perfectly flat because i wanted a bit of volume, which you can see most of all in the curved areas. when a strip ended, i put another down, overlapping the ends, and kept on sewing.

(edit: A lot of people have written to me saying that it’s hard to scrunch the fabric up on the free arm all the way up to the knee. I wrote more about how to sew in hard-to-reach areas in this post on creative patching.)

for the spiralled ends of the vines, i just sewed the strips around overlapping the others. you absolutely need a jeans needle or at least 110 or 120 for this project to get through all those layers of heavy fabric!

and then i added the leaves to fill in spaces and cover other stains. again i did a double row of stitching, but this time one inside the other along the entire edge of the leaves. you can still see the big stains behind the strips, but you can’t really notice them if you don’t look super close knowing what to look for.

the edges started fraying right away, but the cool part came after the first washing (with something red).

i pulled out the strings and ripped/cut them out…

…thereby leaving the edges white, making the design stand out even more. i just love these jeans to pieces!