So, about this whole ‘bluestar off white’ project. It wasn’t something I planned out with spreadsheets and mood boards, not at all. It kinda just… happened, out of sheer necessity, you could say. I was going through a phase, stuck in a rut, doing this mind-numbingly boring temp work. You know the kind, where you feel your brain cells just giving up one by one. Click, click, data entry, day in, day out. It paid the bills, barely, but man, it was soul-crushing.
One weekend, I was just rummaging through my closet, trying to find something, anything, to feel a spark. And there it was, this old denim jacket. Perfectly good, but just… blah. Plain. And it hit me. This jacket needed a new life. And honestly, so did I.
Getting Started: The Great Off-White Hunt
First off, I had this vision: off white. Not bright white, not cream, but that specific, cool, slightly worn off white. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. I swear, I must have gone to five different craft stores. One person’s ‘antique white’ is another’s ‘ivory mist’. It was a proper pain. I ended up mixing a couple of fabric dyes, hoping for the best. Talk about trial and error. My bathtub looked like a modern art experiment gone wrong for a few days.
Then, the bluestar. I didn’t want some chunky, obvious patch. I pictured this tiny, almost faded blue star, like something you’d barely notice at first. More hunting. Couldn’t find the right stencil, couldn’t find the right paint. I ended up deciding to try and hand-paint it, which, considering my artistic skills are, shall we say, ‘enthusiastic’ rather than ‘precise’, was a bold move.
The Actual Making Of It: Sweat and (Almost) Tears
So, I got the jacket prepped. Washing it, then the dyeing process. That was an adventure. I followed the instructions, mostly, but ended up with a few splotchy bits. At first, I was annoyed, but then I figured, hey, adds character, right? Made it look even more ‘mine’.
The dyeing part, let me tell you, it was a whole afternoon. Stirring this big pot, trying not to splash dye all over my tiny kitchen. It felt like I was brewing some weird potion. Then rinsing it out, hoping the color would stick and be even-ish. The moment of truth when it came out of the final rinse… not bad! A bit more ‘aged stone’ than perfect ‘off white’, but I kinda dug it.
Then came the bluestar.
- I practiced on some scrap fabric first. My first few attempts looked more like blue blobs.
- I tried making a tiny stencil out of card, but it kept bleeding.
- Eventually, I just went for it, freehand, with a super fine brush and a lot of holding my breath.
It’s not perfect, not by a long shot. It’s a little wobbly. But it’s my wobbly star.
What I Figured Out
The whole thing took me a couple of weekends. And here’s the kicker: all that fiddling, the mess, the small frustrations with the dye and the star… it felt more real, more satisfying than weeks of that temp job. That job was just numbers on a screen, easily deleted, easily forgotten. But this jacket? I changed it. I put work into it. I could touch it, wear it. It wasn’t about making some high-fashion piece. It was about the process, about making something with my own hands, especially when other parts of life felt so out of my control.
So yeah, the ‘bluestar off white’ jacket. It’s not gonna win any design awards. But every time I look at it, or wear it, I remember that feeling of just making something, just for the sake of it. And sometimes, that’s all you need to pull yourself out of a funk. It’s a bit rough around the edges, a bit imperfect, just like most things in life, I guess. And that’s perfectly okay.
