Jean Pocket Christmas Ornaments That Use the Pocket, Not Just the Denim

A standard five-pocket jean carries five pockets, and only three of them come off cleanly: the two on the seat and the small watch pocket riveted inside the right hip. The front slash pockets are stitched into the fly and the waistband, so by the time you have freed one you are holding a limp bag with no face to it. That is worth knowing before you cut. The other thing worth knowing is that most denim ornament projects treat a pocket as a convenient source of blue fabric, unpick the topstitching, and throw away the one thing a pocket has that a rectangle of denim does not: a finished, double-stitched, rivet-anchored opening you could never sew that neatly yourself. Everything below keeps the pouch, and almost all of it comes out of jeans already headed for a donation bag.

Gift card pockets that hang on the tree until Christmas morning

Cut the pocket off with half an inch of the seat panel still attached, seal or hem that border, and you have a gift card envelope that hangs on a branch for three weeks and then gets opened. The dimensions work in your favor: a gift card is 3.375 by 2.125 inches, an adult back pocket is roughly six inches square, so the card sits well below the opening where nobody standing in the room can see it.

Stopping the card from sliding out

One sew-on snap at the center of the opening handles it, and a snap is the only closure that survives a tree getting knocked; velcro grabs the twill nap and pulls fibers, a button needs a buttonhole you do not want to cut through four layers of denim, and a stitched-shut opening defeats the point. Sew a two-inch strip of ribbon inside the back wall of the pocket first, so the card comes out with a pull rather than a fingernail.

The tag problem

Write the name straight onto the denim with a fine oil-based paint pen and let it dry overnight, because anything hung around the neck of the ornament immediately turns it into a labeled parcel. That distinction, between an upcycled gift and a gift that visibly used to be something else, is the whole difference between these getting kept and getting quietly binned in January.

Watch pocket miniatures, one ornament per pair of jeans

The small pocket riveted inside the right front, the one Levi's has called a watch pocket since the 1870s, makes the smallest ornament on the tree and there is exactly one of them per pair. That scarcity sets the project: a set of six takes six pairs, which is why this is the idea to save for a thrift-bin haul rather than the two pairs in your own closet.

The mismatch is the reason to make them

Six watch pockets from six pairs will never match, and a row of six near-identical indigo squares would be dull anyway. Sort them lightest to darkest before you attach the hangers and the set reads as deliberate rather than as leftovers.

Mini stockings that keep the pocket as the cuff

Turn the pocket so its finished top edge becomes the cuff and you have skipped the fiddliest seam in the whole project. Cut the foot from leg denim in a paler wash, sew it to the pocket’s lower edge with the seam on the outside, and leave the raw edge showing. If you want the full-size version to hang from the mantel instead, our thirteen denim stocking designs cover the leg-panel construction that a pocket is too small for.

If the pocket is not the part you want Upcycled Denim Christmas Ornaments From Old Jeans Ornaments cut from the whole pair, with a straight answer on whether to fray the edges or lock them down.

The window pocket that frames a photograph

Cut a rectangle out of the pocket face just inside the topstitch line and those two rows of orange thread stop being decoration and start being a picture frame. It is the one idea here that people actually keep, because it turns a pair of jeans somebody wore into a thing with a face in it, and the frame was already sewn before you started.

Cutting the window without losing the stitch line

Stay a quarter inch inside the stitching and seal the raw edge before you do anything else, because twill unravels along the weft fast and a cut edge left bare will have shed a visible fringe by the time you have finished the second one. A liquid seam sealant dries stiff and slightly glossy, which on a window edge is an advantage; it holds the shape of the rectangle.

What goes behind it

A photo printed on plain paper at home is fine and better than photo paper, which is stiff and reflects light back at whoever is looking. A child's drawing scaled down, a scrap of the jeans' own leather patch, the care label with the size still legible: all of them work, and the label one is funnier than it sounds when the jeans belonged to a teenager who has since grown a foot.

Pockets that hold cedar, cinnamon and a dried orange slice

This is the version that does not need sewing at all. The pocket is already a container, so the whole job is choosing a fill with enough stiffness to stand up above the opening: cedar and blue spruce hold their shape, cinnamon sticks give you vertical line, a dried orange slice tucked at the front catches light through the segments.

Keeping the scent past the first week

Cinnamon sticks stop smelling of anything after about ten days in a warm room, so glue a cotton wool ball to the inside back wall of the pocket, behind the fill, and put two drops of cinnamon leaf or fir oil on it when you hang the ornament. Keep the whole thing under a couple of ounces, or it will droop the branch and hang crooked. The same loaded pocket sits flat at a place setting with a napkin through it, which is one of the moves in our denim winter tablescape ideas.

For attaching sprigs to the pocket face rather than dropping them in, use a no-sew permanent fabric adhesive that stays flexible when dry and clamp it with a clothespin for an hour.

Pocket angels without the doily wings

Hang the pocket opening-down and it is already a gown, with the topstitching arc reading as a hem. Wings cut from a second layer of the same denim, stiffened and left slightly frayed, are the version I would make; lace and doily wings are what make these read as a church craft table. If you want it built properly rather than described, we have a step-by-step for the pocket angel, wings and all.

What to do with the rest of the jeans 11 Upcycled Jeans Decor Ideas for the Pile You Can’t Toss Eleven ways to use the felled seams, the rivets and the knee fade once the pockets are gone.

Bleached pockets read from across the room, indigo does not

Dark indigo on a green tree turns into a hole. Our denim Christmas garland ideas make that argument at length and it applies twice as hard to a pocket, which is a small object competing with lights; the pale ones are what people notice from the sofa, and the pale ones are also where the gold topstitching finally shows up as a graphic element rather than as thread.

Indigo goes orange before it goes white

Indigo strips warm, so a pocket passes through rust and then brassy yellow on the way to cream, and most people panic and pull it out at the orange stage. Do not: rust is a stopping point worth keeping on one or two pieces, but if you want pale you have to push through it, which takes longer than the bottle suggests. A pen gives you control a dip bath never will, so you can draw a stripe across the pocket face or fade only the lower third.

Rinsing matters more than it sounds

Household bleach is sodium hypochlorite, and the textile industry largely abandoned it for cotton because of fiber damage, switching to hydrogen peroxide, which now handles the great majority of commercial cotton bleaching. Mills stop the reaction in a neutralizing bath rather than trusting a rinse. You are not running a mill, but the chemistry does not care: rinse the pocket in cold water until the water runs clear, then wash it, or the bleach keeps working in the fibers while the ornament sits in a box for eleven months.

The numbered pocket countdown, if you have eight pairs to spare

Do the arithmetic before you start this one. Three pockets come off a pair without a fight, so twenty-four days needs eight pairs, which at thrift-shop prices of three to eight dollars each is thirty to sixty dollars of jeans for a calendar you could buy assembled. It only makes sense if the jeans are already in the house, or if the pockets come from jeans that meant something, which is the version worth doing: the ones your kids outgrew, numbered in order of who wore them. Twenty-four other things to make from the same pile are in our upcycled jeans Christmas crafts roundup if you end up with a surplus of legs.

Twelve days is the honest version

Halve it and the project stops being a fabric problem. Twelve pockets, four pairs, one afternoon, and each pocket can be bigger because you are not rationing back pockets against a count of twenty-four. Back a floppy pocket with Pellon 987F fusible fleece pressed to the inside face and it will stand open on the wall instead of collapsing flat once there is a chocolate in it, which is the thing that makes hung pockets look sad by about the eighth of December. Number them with white fabric paint through a stencil, not with stick-on numerals, which curl off denim within days.

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