This project began with the free box. It was a random tuesday and I didn’t have any plans so, as I often do, I wandered around until I found myself at the free box. The free box is a wonderful area of our campus where people are welcomed to leave any unwanted items they are done with in the hopes that they will find a new home. Stuff is constantly moving through the free box and there is no truer delight than seeing something that used to be mine that I put in the free box now living its life on someone else’s shoulders.

On this particular tuesday at the free box, I realized there were quite a few black jeans. This was somewhat unusual and it felt like some sort of creative opportunity must be there, so I grabbed 3 pairs of black denim and headed home. I laid out the jeans on the floor and began to try and imagine what sorts of things I could create with this mess of sturdy fabric.

When I first laid them out, I imagined a jacket with a high collar, something like this:

But then instead I began to patchwork together little pieces of the fabric into larger and larger sections. I like this sort of fiddley project and so I embarked on a long handsewn journey.

After many weeks of labor and some finagling to figure out what shape I was going for, the jacket became miraculously jacket shaped! I added sleeves made out of pants legs, a lining of repurposed flannel, and stitched it all together.

This project was a practice in patience and exploration. It was fun to see where random patchwork shapes could take me and to understand the challenges and joys of working with denim.