Refashioned Friday - Patchwork Bellbottoms Jeans

I haven't worn jeans in years. The last time I remember wearing any was in 2007.

Since having my daughter an even larger portion of my wardrobe has become unavailable to me. I don't know about you, but having clothes that fit plays a helpful part in making me feel comfortable in my own skin for the day. If I look like crud, I feel like crud.

There's no telling for certain when the last time I tried a pair of my jeans on was - trying on my older clothes to see if they fit and having them not fit is a sure fire way to ruin my morning. So I just avoid it all together.

Early this year I tried to buy some jeans from Old Navy and the short version of this story is that it was a disaster; mostly because when the jeans weren't falling off my butt they were making sure the rest of the world had every chance to get a glimpse of my booty cleavage.

Finally deciding to put on my big girl panties and try on of old jeans I found an old favorite that nearly fit.

Kalloo Kallay
I can pull them up all the way!

But I can't zip and button them.

So I set to work trying to find a way to possibly give me the remaining space I would need to make these jeans something I would be able to wear once again. Following the general premise of how to turn a pair of pants or jeans into a pair of bell bottoms I ripped the outer seam of the jeans as high up as I dared.

As you can see a lot of patchwork sewing went into these.

In fact, it turned out to be a valuable lesson in working with patches. Despite how large your stack of squares is you'd be surprised how quickly you use them up and how small the amount of fabric you have created is.

After my first day at the sewing machine piecing together the scraps of some jeans I could only ever hope to fit again following multiple rounds of P90x, I didn't have enough fabric to begin work on my jeans. That night I came home and pulled out more pairs of those jeans from high school that even Rag-O-Rama wouldn't take because they found the style "high-waisted", way to make me feel even older than I am. This is what I had by the end of the night but I wasn't convinced I had reached the amount I would need; besides, I had already begun ripping up another, darker pair of jeans.

In the end it seems I'd still need at least a little P90x if I want to fit these. I really should have ripped further up the sides that I did. Against my better judgement I let someone talk me into leaving the rip where it was. I'm not really digging most  of the pics my husband took of me in them and am pretty sure that I'm "in hate" with these."

Trying on these jeans left me with the prolonged annoyance I usually avoid that I get from trying on older clothes to see if they fit.

Crafterbation

As if it weren't bad enough that I obsessively knit, my crafting has shifted into overdrive. Recently I fell in love with the concept of clothing that is both knitted and sewn. So I made a couple of dresses that can later be worn as shirt for my little lamb. This didn't sate my crafting appetite so I've set off to do more. Starting with altering a shirt I won a couple of years ago into something a bit more wearable.

Snip

Snip.

Snip.

FRAK! I was now at the stopping point for the day. My sewing machines and serger aren't set up at the house and I kind of couldn't even if I wanted to so I had to wait until I could run over to my husbands grandmother's house so that I could make use of hers.

Actually she uses a Husqvarna Viking embroidery machine as her primary sewing machine. The previous night I was thinking about altering some jeans into bell bottoms, but the following morning when I went to try them on I found myself unable to fit the remainder of my pregnancy tummy into the jeans. I talked over my jean ideas with a fantastic crafty friend of mine and set to work ripping seams. However, I was on such a high from all this crafty goodness i accidentally ripped the inseam instead of the outerseam for the jeans I plan to alter. So yet again I have to wait until my next visit to grandmas to fix the mistake and them rip the correct seam. Stalled again. So I broke out a pile of old shirts and stared at them for a while to come up with something else I could do.

Eventually I settled on cutting up an American Apparel skirt that never fit me correctly and a shirt I wore a lot in high school but that I have no reason to believe will ever fit again.

You'll have to stay tuned to see what I have planned for everything and how it works out.