Have you ever destroyed a favorite piece of clothing? Whether you shrunk it in the wash or spilled something down the front, you can probably sympathize with the young man who kneeled in tile cleaner, accidentally bleaching his favorite jeans.
Clothing mistakes happen all the time. More often than not, you just toss the ruined garment out and go about your day.
Still, it can be pretty devastating to lose a favorite piece of clothing just because you accidentally tossed a red T-shirt in with your load of whites.
Fortunately, there are a few clever ways to salvage an old piece of clothing, or at least recycle it into something new!
For example, a sweater that's getting ragged can be converted into a cute dog bed! Lots of other minor flaws can be fixed with dye, patches, and a little creativity.
One great example of DIY ingenuity in action comes to us via Imgur, where a young man chronicles the dramatic story of accidentally bleaching his prized Levi's, and then giving them a clever new facelift!
A young man recently took to the image-sharing site Imgur to share a roller coaster of a tale regarding his favorite pair of Levi's 511's.
The young man explains that he was wearing his gray Levi's jeans while doing some chores around the house.
When it came time to scrub down the bathroom, he decided to "chance it" in his good jeans instead of changing into some grubbier work clothes instead.
He paid the price when he glanced down and realized he had bleached one of the knees pure white.
He writes online that it all started when he decided to scrub down his bathroom tile with some Tilex Mold & Mildew.
He notes: "It clearly says on the bottle 'contains bleach', but I thought I'd be both too lazy to change and not careful enough when scrubbing tile. End result: a bleached knee. Whoops."
We've all been there, doing a messy chore without changing because we're going to be "really careful this time." It never ends well.
After the young man realized what he had done to his favorite jeans, he decided to simply embrace the accidental bleaching.
He writes, "I figured at this point they're completely unwearable outside of housework, which sucked because I loved these pants. I decided I had nothing to lose, so I would just go all-in and Tilex the rest."
Sometimes, you just need to roll with the punches!
He began carefully saturating his jeans in the strong tile-cleaning solution, working over the pants section by section.
He sprayed the tile-cleaner evenly over the fabric, and used a tub in his laundry room to the keep the chemical spray contained.
In the above photo, he points out, "You can see the bleached color on the left and the old gray color on the right."
He slowly progressed down one leg of the pants. Above, you can see how the jeans looked when one leg was fully bleached, and the other had not yet been treated.
There's a clear contrast between the whitish-gray hue of the bleached leg, and the foggy gray color of the unbleached denim.
After he finished spraying down the jeans, he mixed a solution of three parts tile-cleaner and one part water, then soaked the jeans for 15 minutes. This was to make sure that the bleaching turned out evenly.
Next, he tossed the jeans into the laundry on their own. He ran them on an ordinary wash cycle, noting that he used ordinary detergent, as well as laundry bleach.
Once they were dry, he threw on his new bleached jeans to show them off for the camera!
They look pretty stylish, if you ask us!
Not every "ruined" piece of clothing comes with such a happy ending, and it was clever and innovative of him to use the tile-cleaner to finish the job.
For anyone else looking to bleach a pair of jeans, it might be wiser to stick with ordinary bleach, instead of using the more expensive tile cleaner. Still, he obviously got great results, so maybe it's worth a try?
If you love using DIY techniques to recycle clothes, be sure to SHARE this awesome story with friends and family!
