Baby Firefly Jeans

When choosing characters to recreate for my October Outfits project, I noticed that Baby Firefly’s outfit in The Devil’s Rejects is pretty similar to Erin Hardesty’s outfit from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I didn’t want to do two posts of a white tank top, blue jeans, and a cowboy hat without at least attempting to distress the jeans for Baby Firefly. There are more film-accurate recreations for sale, but I’m not trying to own anything with a confederate flag on it, even if I’m dressing up as a character who does. I ultimately took a pair of stained jeans that I had dedicated to using for painting and yard work activities to alter for this look.

I took a piece of scrap wood that would fit inside the pant leg to ensure my cuts didn’t go through to both sides of the pants. Once the wood piece was inside, I used a box cutter-style knife with a razor blade to make some horizontal slices up and down the legs in the front. I tried to vary the lengths and space out the placement.

Since this was the first time I have attempted to distress anything, I was more conservative with my cuts and placement than I would be now after finishing this project and seeing the result of this work. I spent time pulling out individual vertical threads to make some of the holes and rips larger with some horizontal threads staying in place.

In between the cutting and the bleaching, I washed and dried these jeans. For the bleaching process, I used this tutorial as a guide.

I pulled out my stash of rubber bands and while I watched a movie, I pulled different parts of the jeans into different-sized lumps and bumps while putting rubber bands around them to hold them in place. This is similar to a tie-dye technique.

In the gross metal tub sink in the creepy part of my basement, I filled an empty plastic popcorn bucket with the tied-up jeans and then two parts water to one part bleach. I used the fork to push all the parts under the liquid and then put the glass measuring cup on top to hold it down for the process.

Once the hour was up, I removed all the rubber bands and then rinsed the jeans before putting them through the washer and dryer by themselves.

I really like how these jeans turned out, and the previous dirt and paint stains aren’t really visible with all the bleach spots and distressed holes now.

In retrospect, I would have gone harder on the holes and made the distressed bits more of a destroyed vibe for Baby Firefly, but these are probably more wearable as day-to-day pants as they are now.

See more of these jeans in The Devil’s Rejects: Vera-Ellen “Baby” Firefly post.

What do you think of how this process turned out? Is it something you would try? If you do, please let me know how it turns out!

Catch me back here next week for another post.

In the meantime, check out The Devil’s Rejects: Baby Firefly Vibes board on Pinterest.