How to Make Distressed Jeans

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Mitra Chester, and I'm at Deluxe Resale Shop in Eugene, Oregon, and I'm going to show you some techniques you can do at home that will accomplish different sorts of distress on your jeans. These are some examples of both home-done and factory-done distressing techniques on denim. There is the slashes with the frayed edges, some basically fade marks or snagging, there is patching over a hole and under, there's various types of creasing and whiskering, faded areas, and fading and fraying along the edge of seams. So to accomplish these techniques the first thing you need to do is put the jeans that you're planning on doing this with on your body and take a piece of chalk and mark the areas that you want to do them. So basically if you want some whiskers you're going to crease your pants at the natural whisker spot and mark the edges. If you want slashes, mark the length and placement of the slash. Holes, you want to mark the hole on your body so that once this is all finished it won't look really awkward and fake when you're wearing them. Once you've done that, take the jeans off, lay them on a flat surface. Some tools that you might need would be some fabric scissors, maybe a bleach pen, an Exacto knife or pocket knife, and sandpaper or a pumice stone, and then you take your jeans. The first effect we'll explain is this kind of hole or slash. To achieve the fraying on the edges, and basically to finalize any of these techniques, you are going to want to wash and dry your jeans when you're through applying these techniques. So I have a pair here that on one side has the effect and on this side I've actually done the thing. So this is a hole, so basically what I did was I marked a hole, you're going to cut within the perimeters of the hole with your fabric scissors, and then wash and dry them and it will fray out to this original line. For slashes you're going to basically start a cut by pinching them, and you can either cut along, but again, keep within, if you want your cut to ultimately be this big, you might want to cut it that much because it will fray out a little bit. Now to achieve kind of this snagging or fading, you can use an Exacto knife. If you apply the blade vertically, you're going to just achieve kind of a...this is what it's going to look like once it's washed and dried, just a kind of a fade spot. You have a little bit more control when you're using a knife or a blade than, say, if you're using sandpaper. If you're wanting to go in a larger area, maybe on a knee or thigh, you can use your sandpaper and basically scrape across the denim within the perimeters of the area that you want to have faded. And once you do that for a while it will start to remove certain areas of color, and again, you can kind of blend the edges to make it look a little bit more natural. And once that's washed, it will basically look like that. So maybe for the whiskers, or any kind of lines that you might want to achieve down the front of your jeans, you've marked them with chalk, you're going to take your bleach pen and basically trace along the chalk lines with the bleach pen. Some bleach pens need to be activated with warm water, so you might spray it with warm water ahead of time or just throw it directly in the washing machine afterwards. If you want a crease down the front you can basically iron a crease equidistant between the two side hems, and once you've done that you're going to apply a bead of bleach pen to that seam. In order to achieve kind of a fraying or a lightening along the edges of a seam, again you can use your Exacto knife and scrape it along the edge. Here, let's find a spot that's still dark, scrape it along the edge exposing some of the whites, reds, and also just kind of chopping it up, and that's basically what happens to your jeans after you wear them for a while on the edges. And you can do that along the bottom or along the belt loops or the waistband. And again, try to avoid any kind of ill-placement or overdoing of certain types of techniques that can make it look a little bit fake which is where some of the factory-done distress kind of falls short. Keep in mind, when you're distressing your jeans, the distress is real and they will wear as really distressed jeans, holes will spread and rip further, so if you want to have a long life for your jeans you may take it easy with the holes and slashes and that type of thing. But have fun experimenting and good luck!"