Paint Your Clothes || Distressed Jeans DIY

There are so many simple joys from my childhood I know my children will never get to experience. Phones attached to walls, with long curly cords for example. Saturday morning cartoons. Now, I know having cartoons on tap all the time, whenever they want sounds like a much better option but  I still say it’s a loss. The anticipation! The excitement! These privileged saps… they have no idea.

I’m also sad my children will never know what it’s like to walk into a thrift store and find legit, old school orange tab vintage Levi’s–several pair in fact!–for dirt cheap and in the perfect worn-in condition. Due to online vintage retail hunters and ever dwindling resources, a once common occurrence will be a needle-in-a-haystack experience for my children. Sad.

But if being a blogger means anything, it means making new things look old and generously sharing that wisdom with others. In other words, you’re welcome. Enter the distressed jeans tutorial. While it takes a little time, this tutorial is super easy and I absolutely love how my jeans turned out. And for me, it all comes together with the paint splatters, which is why once again I’m encouraging you to paint your clothes! (See past PYC posts here and here.) Check it out!

First, I did thrift these Levi’s, but they are newer. I cut off the bottoms to get a frayed edge, and then subjected them to a couple different bleach baths to get the just right faded look. There are so many different ways to do a bleach bath, but I had the best experience with putting them in the bathtub so they are nice and spread out and they bleach a little more evenly. I like the variation in color, but if you bleach them in a small tub or even a sink the color come out really splotchy and I just didn’t want that look. Just make sure to keep an eye on them and rinse them out right away, then put them in the wash by themselves to get all the bleach out. And for heaven’s sake don’t wear nice clothes, use nice towels, etc. You are working with bleach! Use at your own risk and take proper precautions so you don’t ruin all your crap and blame it on me.

Once they’re bleached to a great color lay them out on a drop cloth or paper and grab some white paint. Craft paint, fabric paint, shoot even left over house paint will be fine. That’s sorta the look you’re going for, that lived in “I just painted the house and because I’m so cool and casual I can get away with wearing these pants anywhere I want” look. Start small. Take a brush and get your paint a little drippy and start splattering. Rub some of the paint it with your fingers. Try to get a balanced look by focusing the paint on just a couple key spots with some random drips here and there. Let the paint dry, then turn them over and do the same thing on the back.

You now have perfectly faded and paint splattered denim. And just to be clear, of all the things I am not, butt model is at the top of that list. Yet, I still provide some pics of my derriere for the sake of the denim. I did it all for the denim guys.