Refashion Runway Competition: Week Two – Denim!

We made it to week two of the competition!

(Well at least I hope I did! As I’m typing this, I’m not sure yet which two refashionistas are the first to get voted off!)

If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m so excited to be (or have been?) a contestant on the  Refashion Runway Competition, hosted by The Renegade Seamstress!

Any of you who missed out on week one, the theme for the first week was stripes, and I made a maxi dress out of a bunch of old t-shirts and tank tops.

For this second week of competition…drum roll…the theme is “denim.”

I have a lot of denim refashions I need to get to, but they are all quite simple projects I’ve already seen other people do. I really wanted to challenge myself with something new for this refashion, but hadn’t a clue what to do.

Then all of a sudden it hit me. I had this really cool jean jacket I scored for a mere 49-cents, but ever since I wore it for our last family photo session, I can’t find the darn thing anywhere!

Frankly, I’ve been pretty frustrated about losing it because it would’ve looked great on several of my recent dress refashions!

So I decided to attempt to make a new jacket out of this…

Super comfy, but not the most flattering pair of jeans I own (Trust me, there’s a reason this picture aint showin’ my backside!).

Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with these jeans. They fit fine…they’re comfortable…but I have more jeans than a person needs,  and so I decided to weed some out of my closet.

I started out with the ones that weren’t flattering.

Perfect for the job!

To start, I grabbed my trusty seam ripper and ripped the crotch of the jeans open.

Ouch!

Then I put it on my dress form, upside down.

Say hello to Esmerelda.

After staring at Esmerelda for quite some time, I started to get some inspiration on how I wanted to refashion this.

First, I chopped off the pant legs, then turned the jeans inside out and put them back onto my dress form.

It’s starting to take shape!

I pinned the shoulders and sides where I would be taking them in.

Taking in the sides.

I could see that I wasn’t going to be able to get this off Esmerelda without removing the pins, so I grabbed a pen and marked a line on the fabric, tracing where the pins were, so that I could see where to sew after I took the pins out.

See?

This also made it easier to sew, because now I just had to sew over the line.

After taking in both of the sides, I sewed the shoulders together, and folded the neckline over and pinned…

Like so.

Then I stitched the neckline…

whirrr

After trying it back on Esmerelda, I noticed the back was too baggy, so I pinned the back and marked where the pins were, and stitched it up.

Making it fitted.

Then I decided to make some darts.

I’m not a pro at making darts, but I figured I could just wing it.

I pinched the excess material on one side of the bust, pinned and marked with a pen where the pins were.

Darts!

After removing it, I matched up the marked side with the unmarked side and tried to match up the darts on both sides perfectly before sewing.

Stay on the line! 🙂

Once both darts were stitched, I trimmed the excess material off and got busy making sleeves.

I grabbed the pantlegs I had chopped off earlier, slid them up my arm and pinned in place. (This part was easier said than done.)

Making sleeves!

After matching up the sleeves to make sure both were pinned evenly, I stitched them up and trimmed off the excess material.

Then I attached them to the arm holes of my new jacket, matching right sides together, and sewed them in place.

attaching the sleeves

I decided my jacket needed some more pizazz, so I took the leftover pant-leg material (that had been trimmed off my sleeve)…

hmm this will work nicely

…and folded it over.

wrong sides together

Then attached it to the neckline to form a groovy collar.

Groovy!

To get the collar to fit nicely I had to make a few gathers, but I really like the way that looks.

All that’s left to do is sew…

Love the gathered look.

Once the collar was sewn in place, I tried it on…

Quite snug!

Sorry for the blurry pic.

I figured this might be a little tight, but after getting it on, it was very very difficult to take off! So I knew I needed to add a zipper.

The problem was, all I had were skirt zippers (the kind that don’t separate completely).

I really didn’t want to drive all the way to the store and spend money on a brand new zipper, so I scoured my garage for something that would work. (My clothing racks were still set up from my last garage sale.)

This is what I came up with.

This will work!

I thought the bold black might look cool down the back of my jacket, so I cut it away from the sweater.

Free zipper!

And attached it to the jacket.

Right sides together.

I cut enough excess material on either side of the zipper, that it was really easy to pin it to the new opening in the back of the jacket and sew it together without the zipper getting in the way.

stitchy stitchy

Once both sides were sewn, it looked like this…

Works great!

I really liked the funkiness of my new jacket. I liked that you could totally tell it was an upside down pair of pants – turned jacket. But it was still missing something.

I asked my daughter what she thought it was missing and she had a fantastic idea!

Here’s a hint…

Petals!

I cut these petals from the few scraps that were leftover from my refashion.

leftovers

To attach the petals together to make a flower, I started with the circular part that I had cut out for the center. Since it had several layers attached , I put my needle inside the layers to hide the knot on my thread.

See?

Then I layered the petals (biggest on bottom) and stitched back and forth several times through all the layers of petals until it looked like this…

Ooh! Pretty!

Once it looked just right, I grabbed a pin back and sewed that onto the back of my flower to make a pin.

Cool ‘eh?

With this awesome (removable) flower pin, I can wear the collar different ways, like this for example…

This also shows off the awesome pleats!

This is my favorite way to wear it.

Front

Back

It can also be turned around and worn backwards (or with the zipper in front).

So there’s my interpretation of this week’s “denim” theme.

Which way would you wear it? Zipper in front or back?

Don’t forget to check out my competitor’s interpretations of this week’s theme over at the Refashion Runway Competition, and vote for your favorite! 🙂

Have a fantastic weekend everyone!
~Jen