Getting Laced

The best-cheapest-most-environmentally-friendly-personalized way to get new clothes is to first fancy up your old ones. Here's a great tutorial on how to make the perfect pair of cut offs shorts. It also shows you how to add a lace cutout to shorts with just a little hand sewing and some scissors. By the way, if you ever sew or tinker with sewing or want to tinker with sewing, buy a good pair of fabric scissors, and save them just for fabric. Never use them to cut through paper--it's a fast way to dull them to oblivion (paper is wood, after all). A good pair of fabric scissors just makes your work more enjoyable, which makes it feel less like work. Anyways, I love lace (obviously). So I made a pair of these lacey shorts. Here's how it went:



In the end, I really like how they turned out, though I wish I had made the cut offs just a little shorter in the first place. I may have to do it all over again so I can cut them to a more flattering length, but it was so easy that a redo doesn't really bother me.

Oomphing Up: Finished Product

Oomphing Up

I've had this cheap H&M jacket lying around for a few years, and while I've always liked it, it's a little plain for my taste. This morning, I was finally ready to do something about it. I spent something like $4 on lace and thread, and it took me about an hour to complete. If you can sew around a curved edge on a sewing machine, then you should give this cheap and simple project a try to give a little life back to an old staple.