Lee DIY Denim Workshop – Showcasing Our Style through DIY Jeans
When in Manila, it can get pretty hard to come up with an event that regular event-goers like myself will deem to be completely unique. The Lee DIY Denim Workshop was very successful at this, though. To reignite 125 years of craftsmanship by the brand, the Lee DIY Denim Workshop gave us a look and a literal feel of Lee’s spirit of craftsmanship – and boy, was it fun!
Upon entering the event, we were asked for our jeans size and given a pair of jeans that we were meant to go crazy with at the event. To be honest, I had no idea what my jeans size was, but that didn’t stop me from having some fun with it. I guessed my size (I guessed wrong. Lol.) and then proceeded into the event area upon being given a DIY guide that I was meant to follow during the event.
Surprisingly, the venue was already packed despite the fact that I got there pretty early. Looks like everyone was excited to find out what Lee’s DIY event was all about! While we were all given a pair of pre-treated denim jeans, there were hundreds of possibilities available to personalize our pair.
With jeans in hand, I was a bit hesitant to try my luck at becoming the ultimate Lee Jeans Creator, though. After all, I don’t have a single artistic bone in my body. Fortunately, the Lee Style Army was there to help us out every step of the way.
The first station involved the Dry Process, wherein we had the option to scrape our jeans, give them whiskers or distress them. I watched Verniece distress her jeans, though, and got uber scared that I’d mess mine up in the process, so I decided to give my jeans whiskers instead. You know those lines that you see on jeans? They look simple enough, but they are not easy to make. Take it from me.
After trying the process out, though, I ended up having so much fun doing it that I even volunteered to do the whiskers on one of my lazy friend’s jeans. :p
Look at me – so hard at work! :p
Now, as mentioned earlier, I’m not exactly the artistic type, so I opted to skip station 2, which involved the Wet Process. Here, people had the option to play around with paint and bleach to give their jeans a splattered effect or an ombre effect.
Some people created complete masterpieces on their jeans. By this time, I had accepted that I definitely wouldn’t be dubbed one of the ultimate Jeans Creators. :p
Station 3 was for the Finishing and it was simple enough. All we had to do was choose our trims, rivets and labels and the helpful Lee team would fasten everything onto our jeans for us. 🙂 This served us our downtime during the workshop!
So many patches, so little time!
After that came Station 4 – my favorite part of all! Here, we could add pre-made patches to our jeans or come up with our very own embellishments with studs and stones.
This wasn’t as easy as it sounds, either. We had to place the embellishments in the exact position that we wanted them to be in and since the embellishments weren’t exactly huge, we had to use a pencil to push them around onto the right positions. Once there, we then had to very carefully place a sheet of tape onto it so that they wouldn’t fall off or move around before placed into this machine:
This machine basically pressed the embellishments down to ensure that they stuck onto the jeans and wouldn’t fall off.
Wanna see my finished product?
Ta-daaa! What do you think? Naturally, I opted for a Wonder Woman logo design to match my personal blog. Awesome, no? Too bad I got a pair of jeans that were maybe two or three sizes too small. Haha. More motivation to hit the gym and attend some barre3 classes When in Manila, though! :p
I definitely idolize jeans makers now. I had no idea so much hard work went into them. Whew! Hoping to attend more cool events from Lee soon! 🙂
Photos by Gerd Perez.
Lee DIY Denim
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