Est. 2010
How to Make High Waisted Jeans from Low Waisted Jeans
By now you surely know I hate having to buy anything new.
But there are a few clothing items I just about always buy new. Undies (no “just about” here…straight up always!), shoes, and sadly…jeans all fall into this category.
Jeans are great. They’re comfy and go with everything. But jeans can be annoying in that their “on trend” silhouette changes every few years, leaving us with a bunch of dated denim that we no longer want to wear.
Right now, high-waisted jeans are in style. But do you need to toss out your old low-waisted jeans and buy new jeans to remain au currant? No. You do not.
I bought this pair of low-waisted acid-washed jeans a couple of years ago from the $1 rack at my fave thrift store.
At the time, acid wash denim was stilllll kiiiiiinda in style. If you look closely, you can see they’re too long for me (whyyyy didn’t I hem them…it’s literally what I do!) But I digress.
I wore them a few times, but never really liked them very much, so in the donation pile they went!
I also had these black jeans I also bought for $1 that I’ve worn a TON (here they are on my Instagram) and really like.
I’ve worn them so much, in fact, that they’d begun to wear out in a couple of places.
With the power of these two pairs of jeans combined, I just knew I could create a pair of high-waisted jeans!
First, I used my seam ripper to unpick the belt loops from my black jeans.
I also removed the top part of the zipper.
Then, I cut off the waistband entirely, leaving about 1/2″ below the waist.
Here’s what it looked like when I was done.
I pinned the waist of the black jeans to the waist of my acid-wash jeans.
Then, I stitched the two pieces together!
I pinned each of the belt loops from the black jeans to the acid-wash jeans.
Then, I stitched them down.
The waist of my jeans is now complete, BUT I still have more work to do!
I addressed the length of my jeans by simply lopping off the bottom part of the legs, leaving the raw edge to fray.
At this point, I had the structure of my new jeans how I wanted them, but I still HATED the color/high contrast of the two pairs of jeans.
So, I grabbed a couple bottles of dye!
I mixed about half a bottle of black dye with about 1/3 of a bottle of brown dye.
For some reason, black dye always seems to skew purple, so I thought the brown would help me attain a more charcoal-like hue.
I tossed my jeans and a T-shirt (because why not?) into my washing machine.
About a week ago, our high-efficiency front-load washing machine died a watery laundry room-flooding death. It was a mold factory and I HATED it. No love lost here.
When I selected my (beautiful) new washing machine, I made sure it had the ability to fill the drum with water as desired specifically so I could dye stuff in it.
I selected this on my machine:
I checked in on my dye bath mid-wash and thought everything was going as planned.
After the wash cycle, I rinsed my jeans and stowaway T-shirt in cold water.
But after I dried my jeans, I still didn’t like the color!
Time for a do-over! I grabbed my big pot I usually use for dye projects and prepared a new dye bath for my jeans.
This time I used a full bottle of black dye.
When the dye bath was complete, I dumped out the dye water and added a dye fixative as per the bottle’s instructions.
After 20 minutes of soaking in the fixative, I rinsed my jeans in my washing machine on the delicate cycle in cold water and dried them.
Check out my newly high-waisted jeans now!
I styled my new jeans with that T-shirt I added to the first dye bath and my duster sweater (that used to be a refashioned sweater dress before I un-refashioned it!).
I think these turned out great!
Here’s what they look like from the back!
I’m really glad I didn’t give up after the first dye bath didn’t work out to my liking!
Not bad for $2 worth of jeans plus the cost of dye, right?
Plus, the sewing part of this refashion is ridiculously easy! It took less than 20 minutes!
If you’ve been craving a new pair of high waisted jeans, I hope you’ll give this project a try!
Cheers!
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