Recycling: Jeans to vest in 50 minutes

Many years ago I inherited these from a relative of mine. I thought they were pretty cool at the time (and so did many of my friends surprisingly enough) but they never really fit and I only wore them a couple of times.
I always kept them though, planning to to something with them, and last Friday I finally did. The transformation from jeans to vest took 50 minutes in all, and a good part of that was spent in threading and re threading the overlook machine that tends to be a little difficult madame sometimes.

So if you have some adorned jeans hidden away somewhere, a pair you will never wear again - and a clothes mad girl; you can make a vest like this with minimum effort for no money at all. Given you have a sewing machine and some thread that is. Yes, and some kind of closure. I used the simplest kind, hook-and-eye.

Sadly I was in a hurry and forgot to take pictures during the process. But perhaps my very bad drawings can help a bit.

What you do is you cut off the legs at the crotch and rip the inner seems. Then you open up the ,,legs" and straighten the upper part of each back "leg" like this:

Then you fold the "legs" back together and cut armholes and a v-neck. You also make a little rounding for the neck in the back:


You can use and t- shirt or something like that for a guide. If you do, remember that you want the arm- and neck hole in the vest to be a bit bigger, as you want the vest to fit comfortably over t-shirts and such.

Now you sew the back seam and the shoulder seams. Then you either overlook or zickzack the neck- and armhole edges, fold them in and stitch them in place.

Last but not least, you place two figure seams one each side of the back seam - at the natural waist height. And let's not forget the closure, I used only one set on hook-and-eye, placed just at the end of the v- neck(as seen in he picture below).

























Added : KathieB reminded me of something I forgot. There is no reason to let the top section of the jeans go to waist. You can make something like this for example:
The pictures are printed out on canvas and zickzacked on. The top is hand sewn together. You can skip the pictures and just use beads, scraps of lace or anything that takes your fancy.