Yes, yes, yes I have seriously neglected my corner of the blog-o-sphere. I probably won’t be renewing my blog next year, so I decided to chronicle whatever is suiting my fancy.
This is my second attempt at bleaching denim. The problem, I believe, is that you need to keep stirring or agitating the bleach bath to get an even bleached look. I let it sit since the color was so saturated, which resulted in random dark splotches.
I started out with dark-wash jeans that I picked up at the thrift store (I intentionally looked for a wider leg), cut them off to a longer (shorts) length, then put in a bleach bath of approximately three gallons of warm water and three cups of bleach. Then left them in for about an hour.
Since I wanted to minimize the dark splotches or make them look intentional, I cut (horizontal) holes with scissors and frayed them (by pulling out the blue vertical threads with sewing machine tweezers). (There are multiple videos on youtube for this step.) Note: I was going to give them distressed holes, anyway, the dark spots simply determined where. The one that’s the most visible in the above “After” photo is the smallest. I also used the finest grating side (for nutmeg?) on my box grater and roughed up the portions of the dark spots that did not have an actual hole cut through. Although I have a serger, I used a zigzag stitch at the cutoff, “hem” portion, since I had matching denim thread.
My desire was to team this look up with other trends. Those were denim on denim and booties with shorts–without looking crazily over-trendy! Absolutely NO effort was made to match the shirt and shorts bleach-wise! And, while I like the booties idea, I’m not sure how practical they’ll be in Florida, winter and spring only, I guess.
Here is a better photo of the distressing (but worse of me, ha!). I’m very happy with this trendy look in spite of my very white-girl legs. IMHO, especially as we age, we need to edit trends so it doesn’t look like we’re trying to compete with 20-somethings and fitting in with our body-types and style aesthetic, so we don’t become stuck in some prior decade with our fashion choices.
Happy refashioning!