Adventures with Bleach

I've been a bit of a slacker here on the blog, lately. This has partly to do with the convergence of Holy Week/Easter planning, a busy time in the semester for teaching, and a big academic conference where I'm presenting a paper. The blog has shifted to the back burner somewhat. But the other reason I've failed to post is that I've had this fashion DIY scheduled for the last two weeks, but it kept taking longer than anticipated and, finally, failing.

Here's the story. Last year around this time, I wanted some pastel jeans. I had some bright fuschia ones that I was willing to sacrifice to experimentation. I filled my bathtub with a bleach and water mixture, let the pants soak for a few hours, and when I removed them, rinsed, and dried them, they were the perfect color of pale lavender. It was a total DIY success. Then, I tried to do the same with a pair of bright teal jeans, hoping to achieve that pale mint color that was everywhere last spring. This was a complete failure. The jeans were not only barely a different color, but they were splotchy -- random patches of dark and light teal were all over them. I finally bought some mint jeans, and kept the failed project, in hopes of using them for something else. That's where today's story begins.

This year, what I've been coveting to complete my spring and summer wardrobe is a pair of white jeans.

Like these, whose $60 sale price is still too much for me to spend on something I would probably spill coffee on within the first 24 hours of wearing.

Because I'm not buying new clothes this year, I decided to put those splotchy teal jeans to use by attempting to bleach them completely white. After reading this very helpful tutorial, I realized that I was going to need a lot of bleach, a lot of time, and a lot of patience to remove all the color from my jeans. Including the time I spent trying to bleach the jeans the first time, my jeans spent about 38 hours soaking in a water/bleach solution, and here was what the progress was like at various stages:

The pictures are all a little lighter than the true color, and the final picture especially fails to show the dingy yellowish tint to the jeans at this stage. I knew from past experience that the stitching would not bleach, but I was willing to have some teal bias-stitching. What's really disappointing, though, is that after an additional 14 hours in the bleach solution, the jeans were not much whiter than in picture number three. So now I have some whitish-yellowish jeans with bright teal bias-stitching. Not exactly what I was going for. But I learned a lot about patience with bleach in the process, and I somehow managed to not drip bleach on any of my normal clothes -- a small miracle for me. Who knows? Maybe I'll find a way to wear my off-white jeans that won't look like I'm just wearing dirty clothes. If that happens, you know you can read about it here. And if any of you have tips for getting these jeans truly white, let me know!