Jeans, jeans and more jeans… children have a funny habit of growing out of their clothes, so what do you do with all their old jeans?
Well, in the spirit of ‘reduce, reuse or recycle’, some may go to charity shops, some are passed on within the family or to friends with younger children and then there is the option of putting them into one of the large clothing recycling bins on the street. However, one sure way of knowing the jeans will go to good use afterwards is to turn them into something useful for yourself!
This is how the idea developed to reuse the denim fabric from all those cast-off jeans for reupholstering furniture and making poufs for the home. Denim is such a versatile, hard-wearing fabric that has rarely “worn-out” its full life when children grow out of the jeans, so by giving them a second life within the home is one solution to getting the full value out of them.
The origins of jeans are in workwear – for goldminers in California during the gold rush – due to the durable nature of the fabric. Denim is made with a cotton twill weave, in which the weft thread passes under two or more warp threads, making the fabric more sturdy and robust. The warp threads are dyed indigo whilst the weft is left white or greige creating a changeable colour effect. Given the unique characteristic of indigo dyestuff to fade over time, every worn pair of blue denim jeans has an individual quality depending on how and when they are worn and how often they are washed, irrespective of the cut or styling details. Incredible to think that the basic denim blue jean design has not dramatically changed since their invention in the mid-19th century.
The upcycled poufs and reupholstered stools are made with denim from old jeans by unpicking the seams and reassembling the fabric into larger pieces, giving attention to the placing of details like pockets, zips, belt loops and rivets. These denim pieces are cut to shape for the reupholstering of a chosen piece of furniture or to a pattern for making cushions, poufs or large bean-bag covers.
The robust and easy-care nature of denim makes it ideal for this use and the individual worn-out quality of the fabric makes each piece unique.
It makes me smile seeing my kids sitting on a pouf made out one of their past pairs of jeans whilst wearing their present jeans, which one day may end up as a future ‘jean-ius’ seat!
Luckily, for the moment, I have an endless supply of jeans as my kids just keep on growing….
There are so many amazing ideas of how create a new life for your old jeans. Have a look at some of the following sites and blogs. People really are ‘Jean-ius’!
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