fail AND REDEMPTION: BLEACHED SHORTS

This post should've come to you a long time ago but, it has taken a while to get over what I'm about to tell you. Today I will tell you the most depressing story when it comes to crafting. We had big plans for those shorts up there. We had seen all the cute bleached shorts around the internet and thought... we should do this! So we went to Goodwill and got those shorts up there, brought them home, and followed a YouTube tutorial we had seen- STEP BY STEP. To continue with the story, I will tell you exactly what we did.


Cut the bottom of the shorts in whatever way you want.
You can see in the picture how we cut ours.


Take an exacto knife, scissors and sand paper...


And rough up the shorts where you'd like.
We cut slits and then went over them with sand paper.


Next we stuck the shorts in a bucket of bleach exactly as many tutorials told us to. We let it sit until the shorts turned white- which Casey's never did. We probably left them for an hour. We didn't think anything of it considering one of the girls had left hers to bleach for TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.


When we got scared of how long the shorts had been sitting in the bleach,
we put them out to dry in the bathtub.


Drying... And here is where the story goes tragic. We let the shorts dry for a long time but they were not drying at all. In the tutorial, the girl NEVER washed the shorts which is upsetting because who wants to walk around in bleached shorts that have never been washed? That's smelly. And probably not good for your skin. We decided we were going to wash ours. So we did. When Casey went to move our shorts from the washer to the dryer, this is what she found...


That's right. We have just showed you how to make a bleached blue jean thong- WITH pockets. Let's just say, I was scarred. It all started out so innocent and now I can't even look at bleached shorts the same. It took a while to have the courage to buy more shorts and give this tutorial another try but, we did. It was mostly scary because we never really figured out what went wrong. So we researched it and this is what we did that actually worked.

- Sit your shorts in half bleach/ half water.
- Let sit for about 20-30 minutes.
- Dry the shorts- we put ours in the dryer after they had dried a little.
- Cut the bottom of the shorts in whatever shape you'd like.
- Wash them alone (or in this case we washed the two pairs together).
- Dry.
- Add designs or proceed to dye another color.


These are the shorts from the second try. Much MUCH better. Mostly because they are actually wearable in public.


I added designs to my shorts with a fabric Sharpie, but that ran out so I switched to a regular Sharpie. Casey is still deciding what she will do with her shorts. We will make sure to show you what she does. If you decide to do this project one day, just go into it knowing that you may end up with a pair of really uncomfortable underwear.