Make a Jeans Tote Bag: Materials & Cutting

Video Transcript

These are the materials we'll be using to make our heavy duty recycled jeans tote. You'll need two pairs of jeans that are about the same size. You'll need a good sharp pair of scissors, some pins, and some heavy needles for your sewing machine - whatever needles that your machine takes - these are a jeans and denim needle. Okay, we'll start by preparing our jeans. You're going to prepare both pairs of jeans the same way. First you want to choose the length - how deep you want your tote to be. So, I'm going to cut it about here, and cut straight across the leg. And then if you just fold it over and cut across the second leg. Okay, save those extra leg sections for the straps, and open that up, and we're going to cut open the crotch area. So, just cut right along the inseam to cut that apart, right along the inseam. And then we'll turn the jeans inside out, and we'll pin and trim to close the section up. So, turn your jeans inside out. Okay, and lay them flat, and we'll just pin the leg section together. And put the pins exactly where you want to sew it, so that you can see how it's going to lay. So, if you put the pins going right along the seam that you want to sew. And that way, you can open it up and check it and make sure that it looks neat. I think that's good. Here I'm going to pin it a little bit more there. And then turn it over and pin the back section the same way. You could take a look at what your seam is going to look like, going like this. It's a little bit bunchy here, so I want to open that up again, and re-pin it until I like the way it looks. We'll turn it over, okay that's better. You're not going to get it 100% perfectly flat here. So, I think that'll be fine if we press it, that'll look fine, and that's a nice straight seam. And then you want to do the same thing for the back section. Okay, this is probably...the best way to pin this is to lay it flat this way. And, following the seam line down, just put your pins in a continuous line. You have a seam line right here, we'll just continue down. Okay, and before you sew it, you want to turn it again and make sure that you like the way it's pinned, because that will be the way it will be sewed. So, you can just check it out, and then re-pin it if you're not happy with your pinning job. But, it should be like that, pretty flat. And, you're always going to have a little bit of a pinch or a bulk there, but that's fine.

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