Days Forty Three and Forty Four

2/13/13 Just popping in really quick to say that I'm not dead and I actually have worked on stuff the last two days but I've just been lame and not posted it. Hopefully I will get it done tomorrow! Right now I'm off to bed. Sorry.

EDIT 2/15/13 Ok, I'm finally getting around to writing this post. I'm really excited about it actually!

So. I messed up dyeing my altered pants purple, so I bleached them white. I like how they turned out, so I may keep them this way, or I may eventually try dying them again, who knows. 

Here's what the pants looked like after I finished altering them from flares to skinnies, and then what they looked like after my sad attempt at dying them.

And then... what they look like now! (I'm slowly starting to figure out how to take more flattering photos of my legs, lol). 

I used this blog post to help guide me through the bleaching. Her shorts apparently took 31 hours (?!?) to be completely bleached, which is kind of confusing to me, since my jeans took only three hours. I probably could have done it longer to get them a little more pure white, but I was satisfied with them and I didn't want the bleach to hurt the fabric more than necessary. And it's a good thing I took them out of the bleach when I did, because on day forty four I had to do some repairs.

The bleach literally ate away at the hole where the button goes through the fabric!

I had to sew that hole up before I could attach a new button, but it's pretty rough since it wasn't just a cut, where you can just sew together the two sides, but a big gaping hole. I wasn't sure the best way to go about fixing that, so I kind of just pretended it was just a cut and pulled two sides together and sewed it all up, but it created gross puckers. A better way to do it probably would have been to put a piece of fabric behind it, but I didn't think of that until later when I had to fix the next thing.

Anyway, here's the new button I attached and the inside with my mess of sewing.

The next thing was that when I put these pants on for the first time after bleaching (then washing and drying), one of the belt loops ripped right out. I put a piece of the jeans (from where I cut off the extra fabric after altering) behind the rip and sewed it all to that backing piece. I also did this to one other belt loop that hadn't ripped out yet, but I saw some tears forming so I did it as a preemptive measure.

 

 

All fixed up! I like how these jeans turned out. Hopefully they're still strong enough that I can wear them for awhile without them falling apart. Though I may be getting good at jean repairs in the near future...