Turn last year’s old jeans into a pair of cool, frayed shorts for summer with this refashioning guide. Designer Meg Healy walks you through the process of making over your old denim in just a few simple steps. You’ll also learn how to add a colorful embroidery design to your shorts to personalize them to fit your style. Hit up your local garage sales to turn a thrifted find into refashioned treasure with this easy sewing project.
Skill Level: Easy
Finished Size: Varies according to pant size
Seam Allowances: N/A
Materials:
- Denim jeans – Thrift or find an old pair of jeans in your wardrobe.
- Jeans/denim needle size 100
- Matching topstitching weight thread to your jeans
- Sharp scissors
- Embroidery machine and thread (optional)
- Lint roller
Instructions:
- Isolate each pant leg and cut shorts to desired length. On this example, the designer made the shorts 6” long along the inseam and cut the pant in a horizontal direction.
- Adding embroidery (optional): Add a piece of sticky stabilizer to your machine hoop or hand hoop and center the short’s side seam in the center of the hoop.
- Load embroidery design on your embroidery machine or transfer a design to some wash away stabilizer and stitch out along side of jean shorts.
- Thread regular sewing machine with denim topstitching thread and stitch a line 5/8” from the cut edge.
- Using a sharp pair of scissors, from the bottom edge of the shorts to the stitching line, clip multiple lines 1/8” away from one another all around the hem.
- Run one of the scissor blades along the cut edges back and forth to further fray the edges.
- Repeat for the other leg hem.
- Using a lint roller to remove all the excess fabric fibers from fraying.
