A Rather Large Denim Refashion

Back in July one of my aunts passed on some old jeans to me. They were initially headed for another aunt that makes quilts from old jeans, but lucky for me, I was in the right place at the right time. She had three pair of jeans and one pair of shorts passed on by a friend of a friend or something like that (let me be clear - these were not my aunt's jeans!). Now, these were not just any jeans. These are a size 58 waist jeans. We can only hope that the owner of the jeans didn't pass them on because he grew out of them.

So, the challenge for me was to come up with some way to refashion these. Let me tell you, there is a lot of fabric in jeans this size. Everything about them is different in scale. The fly is more than 10" long, there are 9 belt loops around the waistband (four more than your average size jeans), and the back pocket is just really, really biiiiiig.

The kids were quite intriqued by these big pants, so we had a little fun with them....

I like the three feet coming out of each pant leg. 

Something that escaped from a Dr. Seuss book?

Scary two-headed monster...

Skinny jeans? These will make you feel skinny no matter what size you are. It's all relative, right?

Shall I adopt the baggy look for autumn?

At this point, I thought maybe we were having too much fun messing around in someone else's pants, but my daughter had lots of other ideas. If you're interested in more pics, you can see them here.

As for the refashioning part, I thought it would be fun to keep the drama of the large size for at least one of the pairs. The others may just be harvested for the fabric. I chose to turn the top of the jeans into a tote bag. There are multiple tutorials out there for this, but I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.

The straps are cotton webbing that I had on hand and the bag is unlined. I figured boxing the corners would make the bag too shallow, so the bottom is an inset rectangle cut from one of the pant legs. I had a long length of this crochet trim that I threaded through the belt loops (all nine!) and tied in a bow.

It has already come in handy as a beach bag - it's good for toting bulky things. The bag itself is fairly heavy, so I don't think I'll fill it up with groceries or anything with it's own heft. I'm a wee bit tempted to enter this in the Tote Bag category at our local fair coming up, but I think it would fill up the entire display case!