Now the Christmas presents have been opened I can share this gift I customised for my friend Mel. When I visited her in August we saw a fab pair of embroidered jeans in a store in San Francisco. It immediately gave me an idea rather than buy them I would embellish an existing pair of jeans that Mel already owned (more eco-friendly too).
Fast forward to November and I rediscovered the jeans and realised I had only a month to decorate them. I immediately created a Pintrest board to research ideas for the embroidery. One of the features of the original jeans Mel liked was the use of existing machine-embroidered patches. I ordered a set of these iron-on patches from Amazon and set about creating designs for the jeans.
I used a range of hand embroidery stitches including; back stitch, chain stitch, seed stitches, satin stitch, hand couching and french knots. The embroidery threads I used are dozens left over from my Textile Degree days over 20 years ago which consisted of DMC, Anchor, Moulin, MTM and Madeira Threads.
I started the design by laying out the iron-on patches grouping them into themes of junk food, fruits, flowers, and then I free-styled the hand-embroidery around the patches.
I thoroughly enjoyed the slow meditative process of creating the designs over the Christmas break. In terms of time I think there is about 25+ hours worth of stitching in the jeans which I sewed in bursts of 2 - 4 hours at a time. Mel really loves them which I am very happy about. Hopefully they will be worn a lot to get maximum enjoyment out of them!
