Assuming you’ve been playing along with me, you now have a pair of jeans that’s minus a leg (from the knee down) and a square bit from the upper part of the leg. So, what to do with the rest of you ex-favorite pair of jeans? This project will use up most of the remaining fabric; leaving just enough for tomorrow’s wrap-up piece.
What is it? It’s a purse made from the hip-area of the jeans, with the seams from the remaining leg used as handles:
I’ve actually been contemplating this for a loooong time (at least a year) but waited to do it because I thought it would be hard. Not at all! It was actually quite easy to make, as you can see in the walkthrough here:
Materials:
- Scissors
- Thread and Needle (or a sewing machine!)
- Jeans (minus one leg.)
- Fancy pin(s) for decoration (optional)
Directions*
(Note: for the purposes of these directions, the “right” side is the one that wasn’t facing skin when the jeans were still being worn.)
- Cut the legs off your jeans, daisy-duke style.
- Resist the urge to try on these absurdly short-shorts.
- Cut the crotch area out of the Jeans, and even out the bottom hem of what’s left.
- Resist the urge try what’s left on as a skirt.
- If there’s a bit of extra fabric at the end of the zipper, that’s caving in oddly, sew it closed so that the front of your bag will be smooth.
- cut the seams from the thigh portion of one of the legs. (This will leave about one full leg’s worth of fabric for tomorrow’s project.
- Take one of the interior pieces from the thigh, and cut it to a rectangular shape that you think will fit the bottom of your bag.†
- Turn the “skirt” inside out.
- Pin the rectangle to the bottom so that the “right” sides face each other.
- Sew around this bottom edge.
- Turn the bag back right-side out.
- Pin your straps to the bag
- If you’re not as lazy as I, sew them into place.
- decorate with other pins, ribbon, fabric paint, etc. as desired.
- Use it, and be totally awesome.
What I really love about this project is that there are endless possibilities for personalizing this once you’ve made a generic jeans-bag. Plus, it’s got built in pockets! What’s not to love about that?
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial. The one tomorrow is, perhaps, not as cool, but is equally fun! And it provides just as much, if not more, potential for personalization.
*These have been slightly modified to fit what I *should* have done with the jeans, rather than what I did. I’ll make a note where my directions diverge from what I actually did.
† This is where my written directions don’t match what I did last night. When I made my bag, I cut a rectangle from the one thigh piece to fit in the bottom of my bag, then cut the seams out of the other thigh later, leaving me with two long, seamless thigh pieces, a shin piece (knee down, with seams) and a few odd-scraps. They got used in the project I’ll write about tomorrow, but over all, I think it would be better if you used your material thus:
A shin piece and a piece of that legs thigh for a wine-bottle bag &:
The other side of that thigh, plus its seams, as the bottom and straps of the bag. That would leave you an entire leg for tomorrow’s project.
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