Re-invent Your Clothes For Summer! (Fashion)

 Hello everyone, as promised today is my second fashion blog post. This one is going to be about how to reinvent some of your old clothes for summer. This could either be through fixing broken items or updating out of fashion items to make them more trendy.

One small piece of advice to consider before continuing reading this post, I didn't do any of this reinventing to any of my most loved clothing items or extremely expensive ones. I would highly suggest you do the same when you first experiment with these techniques, as you don't want to ruin something that cost you a lot of money.

The first way that you could refresh an old clothing item is by cutting it. From a menswear point of view, "cut off" style vests are extremely popular for spring/summer 2014, so a possible way to reinvent an old T-shirt would be to cut the sleeves off. I actually had to cut the sleeves of this T-shirt as it had a rip in the armpit. Make sure that you draw a guideline of where you going to cut so that you can make sure both sides will be even, and also make sure that once you cut the fabric you stretch the gap that you have just made as far as you can and then release. This makes the fabric "curl" and less likely to fray.

I was recently looking on Topman's websites at some of their key trends for summer 2014, and noticed that cut-off or sleeveless denim shirts are becoming increasingly popular. I decided that instead of spending around £40 on one of these I would simply cut the sleeves off one of my old denim shirts. It is important that you use fabric scissors or extremely sharp scissors for this type of cutting as the material is much thicker. I would also advise that you cut as close to the seam, where the arms attached to the body of the shirt, as possible in order to avoid fraying. This not only makes the shirt more trendy, but also makes it more summer appropriate as the sleeveless option is much better for the warmer weather.

Now, although some may argue that the tie-dye trend was more of a 2013 thing. I personally feel that the vibrant pops of colour are really cool way to inject some excitement into your summery outfits. This applies to both men and women, as tie-dying is such a diverse technique due to the large variety of colours and patterns that you can use/create. I have tie-dyed a number of different tops in the past couple of years, however this one is one of the most recent ones that I reinvented for the summer. I used a darker red towards the centre and blue towards the edge, I also mixed the colours to create a purple gradient, and I really like the way is came out. This is a really easy thing to do at home is all you need is a tie-dye kit, bucket of warm water, salt, and elastic bands, which are all very easy to come by. Also you don't have to buy a top especially to tie-dye, any old plain white or light-coloured tops would be suitable. Again saving money over buying a pre-died T-shirt from high street shop.

The final option for reinventing clothing in today's post, is somewhat of a craze this summer. The trend of ripped jeans has come back around big style, and the high street shops are ripping everyone off by charging so much for this destroyed denim. I love the look of ripped jeans but refuse to buy them full price, so instead I just rip my own.  Cutting slits or holes into the knees of your jeans using sharp scissors and then fraying the edges using tweezers or rubbing a hairbrush over the edges, creates a worn in and vintage ripped jeans look. How destroyed you want the jeans to look decides how big the holes or how many holes you should make in the jeans. I've done quite big and multiple holes in these jeans, however in another pair of skinny jeans only put one very thin slit in each knee. My tip would be to put your jeans in the wash after completing the fraying in order to seal everything into place and avoid the jeans becoming over-frayed.

I hope you enjoyed this post, it's probably been my favourite one to do so far. If you would like, I could do some YouTube tutorials (a series of 4) on how to do the cutting of the shirts, and the tops, and ripping of the jeans, and the tie-dying. YouTube videos are something I would like to get into and I feel like this might be quite a good way to ease myself in. As always share this post with all your friends and give me any feedback that you may have.


See you Sunday. X