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Sunday, November 06, 2016

Cherry Blossom Painted Re-Purposed Jeans

My middle daughter wanted help re-purpsing a pair of jeans she hated she hates plain Jane blue pants.  She got some ideas together and collected the acrylic paint and she and I set to work on this sitting on the garage floor to do this.  We used a few shades of pink , purple, red, white, cream, black, yellow and green.  Since we are currently visiting my in laws didn't want to make a mess of their lovely home.  Laid garbage bags on the floor so as not to get it dirty either with paint splatter.  If I had been at my own home I would have just laid this on the lawn and not cared about the splatter as it would go away into the grass.


Forgot to take a photo of the jeans before we started they are just a pair of faded jeans no stains on them and no holes all the staining you see we added with paint.

First we splattered and rubbed white paint into the jeans to give a distressed look.   You could do this with bleach too but that weakens the jeans this gives the look of that but let's the jeans have their full life.  Do this front and back.   Tools used paint brush and tooth brush to splatter and rub thick paint comes out white thin watered down acrylic paint looks sort of like bleach marks.
 Then we painted black branches on the jeans just free handed that, no drawing ahead of time, just used a normal medium acrylic paint brush flat edge.

I don't have a real good camera any more it got lost at Devils Gate  on a hike it fell in the water a few summers back the reason I don't post much anymore.  So sorry if the photos are not the best.
 You can see above on my daughter's shorts she was testing out on her shorts before she put on the jeans... not far in advance meaning she was wearing the shorts and no paint was on them when we started she tested while she was wearing them a few seconds before putting it on the jeans,
We used a hair dryer to dry this faster between steps. All steps are done both front and back.


Next came adding the 5 petaled flowers which we used white pink purple and red mixed in different amounts to get the desired look.  We used the back of the handle to make the petals.  But you could use 5 dowels rubber banded or taped together to go faster just would be more uniform in appearance.  We were going over the petals twice in some cases to add shading.

Once again my daughter was testing on her shorts.  I made jokes that she was going to get two for the price of one with this project if she kept it up. She didn't care about the shorts as she planned to toss them after this project as they are too small.  Because of this testing and cleaning of the brushed on her shorts she got way more paint on her than I did but I think she had more fun because of it too.

Below you can see the hair dryer inside the jeans to help dry the paint faster so we could turn the jeans over and work on the other side.
Hard to see in this photos below but we had added black, white and yellow centers to the flowers.  For this we used paint straight from the tube no thinning this was to give it  texture and tool was a tooth pick you could do this faster too but putting 5 tooth picks around a dowel or straw and having the tooth picks over hang the edge so you could do all 5 dots at once.  We also added green leaves with a touch of yellow and added a little brown to the branches where they showed through the flowers.  Tool used was a flat edge brush for both leaves and branches.

All done painting in this photo except we turned them inside out and placed them in the dryer to heat set the paint.  Then washed and dried them to soften the paint.
Later she wants me to add grommets and pink or black lacing to these jeans for a corseted look to the legs of the jeans.  She also plans on wearing these jeans with the legs pegged.  She likes them tons more now than she did before we did this to them.



3 comments:

  1. Fantastic ! Love the entire process - freehand is my favorite style and cherry blossoms really perk things up.
    Your photographs are very clear & you should post more frequently :-)

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  2. They look awesome and I love the lacing idea. Please keep posting even if you think the photos aren't as good as you would like! I love your fearless upcycling attitude and dedication to techniques that aren't explored much by other people.

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