Bleached denim is something I really wanted for summer, but when I saw pairs online for over $50 I immediately turned up my nose & vowed to make a pair myself. I used this tutorial as a guide, but ended up doing it slightly differently.
I cut these mom jeans into shorts, but did not cut them as short as they are in the final picture. They were about two inches longer because I originally had them rolled up. This will be important later.
I did this in the bathtub in my bathroom, but as a word of caution, make sure you have a fan on & a window open. The smell spreads quickly. The ideal place would be outdoors.
I clipped the shorts on a hanger and put them over the edge of a bucket so that the bottoms of the jeans were just grazing the bottom of the bucket. This is where I differed from the blog's tutorial: I only poured in a small amount of bleach -- just enough to cover half an inch of the bottom of the jeans. (I was really trying to get the ombre effect, not just a clean line of bleach like the tutorial's was, so I decided to do a little experimenting)
I let that sit for 10 minutes & could already see the results. I decided to leave them in for another 10 minutes to see if it would spread farther up, but after seeing that it seemed to have spread as far as it would go, I decided to pour more bleach in so it covered about an inch of the jeans. This set for another ten minutes, and after seeing that it still hadn't spread as high up as I wanted, I frustratingly poured the rest of the bleach in the bucket.
In total, the jeans were in bleach for an hour. (If you know anything about bleach, which I didn't, this is a huuuuuge no-no. When I told my mom about my escapade, her eyes widened in horror) When I took them out of the bucket, I was pleasantly surprised at how great they turned out. Upon washing them out under the faucet of my tub, however, it was clear that the bleach had completely eaten through about two inches of the bottom of the shorts. I could literally just peel it off.
At this point, I angrily ripped the two inches of dead fabric off the bottom & continued washing with water & vinegar. (This is supposed to stop the bleaching process)
Hoping & praying that they wouldn't be torn to shreds (because I was hopelessly in love with them at this point), I stuck them in the washer alone in an attempt to wash out the bleach/vinegar smell & stop the bleaching process for good. I set the cycle to have an extra rinse to ensure they'd be cleaned thoroughly.
After the cycle was done, I hesitantly took them out to find the finished product...... Perfectly frayed & even semi-ombre'd jean shorts! The real moment of truth came when I tried them on to see how short they were. Luckily, with the extra 2 inches I had to account for the rolling up, they were acceptable to wear as is. I only wish I could find a way to get my other shorts as perfectly frayed at the bottom as these without practically dissolving the fabric with bleach.
TOTAL COST: $3 for jeans, $3.50 for bleach, $1 for vinegar, & about an hour of my time :)
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