DIY Crafts

The white threads that show through a ladder knee were in the jeans the whole time. Denim is woven from indigo warp running down the leg and undyed cotton weft running across it, so every pair in your closet is already carrying the ladder somewhere under the surface, and cutting one is mostly a matter … Read more

Most cardboard castles fail for one dull reason: they are built like furniture when the job called for scenery. A fortress that runs floor to ceiling looks tremendous on the afternoon you finish it, then spends three weeks blocking the door, and the tape holding the towers on gives out the second time somebody sits … Read more

Reverse tie dye is the one denim project where the color is already in the garment and the whole job is pulling it back out in a shape you chose. What follows is ten ways to do that on jeans specifically, each with the dilution it needs, the window where you pull it out, and … Read more

A newspaper basket lives or dies in its first twenty minutes, and those twenty minutes are spent rolling tubes. Everything after that, the base, the walls, the rim, is the same over-and-under motion at a slower tempo. Which is the whole reason this guide spends more words on the roll than on the weave. What … Read more

Floral cotton weighs about a third of what denim does. That one fact decides nearly everything about a pair of wide leg patchwork jeans with floral cotton panels: where the panels can sit, how wide they can run, what has to go behind them, and whether the pair is still wearable a year from now. … Read more

A steel food can is worth less than a cent at scrap price and still smells like the inside of a recycling bin after two rounds of dish soap. That is the raw material junk art is built from: objects whose only remaining value is their shape, their color, or the way they take a … Read more

Nearly every denim tote tutorial opens the same way: cut the back pocket off the jeans, then sew it back down somewhere else as a patch. That trades one factory seam, bartacked and riveted and built to survive a decade of wallets, for a worse one you made on a domestic machine. The pocket does … Read more

Denim goes pale at the knee long before it goes through, and the reason is structural: indigo sits on the warp threads only, so every pass of abrasion shaves dye off the surface and lets the undyed weft underneath show as white haze. By the time there is a hole, the fabric around it has … Read more

Five points is the wrong star for denim. The standard template gives you 36-degree spikes, and a 36-degree point in 12-ounce twill will not turn right side out however sharp your chopstick is: you get a stub, a wad of trapped seam allowance, and a shape that reads as a blob from six feet away. … Read more

Nearly every denim apron tutorial opens by cutting up the legs, which is the narrowest part of the garment and the one with the least structure in it. The legs are long and thin; the apron you want is short and wide; and the single piece of a pair of jeans that is already short … Read more