DIY Ombred Shorts

Evening everyone! Seems bleaching and ombring is becoming the latest trend at the moment, so I thought I'd have a hop on the bandwagon and join in! I was doing a bit of a blog browse this morning, when I came over a post by Alexandra at The Wallflower about bleaching your own shorts. Seeing as I've been wanting to buy a pair for a while, I thought I might as well save myself the pennies and make my own! I'd advise doing this outside, as the shorts will drip bleach everywhere, and spillages are bound to occur - for this reason, please make sure you wear old clothes as well, I got bleach everywhere!
I was incredibly happy with the outcome so here's how I did it:

I started with a pair of skinny jeans that had rather lost their skinniness on the legs (if there's one thing I can't stand, it's unskinny skinny jeans) and faded around the knees. Pretty sure these were about 2 years old and would definitely not be missed!

I'm sure this is all very obvious to most of you, but I'm gonna go through all the stages anyway haha! Then I cut off the legs a bit longer than I would want the final shorts to be (to allow for fraying and adjustments of the cut)

Then I filled a large mixing bowl with standard household bleach (I started off with the ratio it suggested on the bottle for clothes bleaching, but after an hour of waiting nothing had happened, so I tipped in about quadruple the amount it suggested). I wanted the shorts to go from their original colour to bleached, so I left the very tops out of the bleach.

About an hour after I had adjusted the bleach amounts, I came back and saw that the shorts had turned this colour - I then moved the shorts so that only the very bottoms were in the bleach because I wanted an ombred effect. Something to remember is that the shorts will be wet when these colours come out - they will dramatically lighten up when dry so make sure to do it a bit darker than you want!

I left them for about another hour before removing them from the bleach. This is what they looked like, but remember the very bottom are still wet, so they'll lighten up after drying.





Now fully rinse the shorts in the bathtub or shower, making sure all the bleach is washed off!
The next stage is cutting the shorts to the right length - I would suggest putting the shorts on and drawing a line in marker pen where you want to cut. If you want frayed edges, cut a bit below the length you want them.

To fray the edges (a tip I again picked up from Alexandra) use a simple kitchen fork to scrape in a downwards motion along the edges - the fibres run vertically, so you almost want to rip them apart from each other. Do this all around the edges :)

Now, wait for them to dry and put them in the washing machine to make sure 100% of the bleach residue is gone before you wear them!

These are my finished shorts:

I'm pretty darn happy with them - and much cheaper than forking out £35 or so for a topshop pair!
Might do a bit more fraying on them tomorrow, what do you think? Or studding, that could be another blog post altogether :o I'd also love to one day try bleaching a pair fully first and then ombring them a colour - maybe a coral or something, that would look great!

Enjoy your ombring - a great morning's activity and a gorgeous pair of shorts at the end of it - any questions don't hesitate to ask!
Liv xo