How to Soften Jeans
It is my personal experience that most of the expensive jeans are soft, as compared to the stiff feeling imparted by the inexpensive ones. While you can save money by buying such stiff jeans, you have to tolerate the uncomfortable feeling of wearing them. Jeans, which have been touted as the most comfortable casual clothing, will lose its very purpose, if it becomes uncomfortable to wear. Sometimes, even some of the expensive jeans are stiff in nature, but don't worry. There is a solution to soften jeans.
Softening Stiff Jeans
Jeans are made of denim, a thick, heavy and strong fabric. This material is treated in various ways to make it fit for wearing. However, some jeans retain the thickness and heaviness which makes them uncomfortable to wear. This can be overcome by adopting the following tips to soften jeans.
- Start with removing the price tags and other instruction cards from the jeans. Turn the jeans inside out and wash it with cold water and a small amount of fabric softener, after setting your washer and dryer in 'regular' mode.
- Once dry, you have to iron the jeans and if needed, a little bit of industrial starch can be used to straighten the fabric. Turn the jeans inside out and roll it into a bundle. Roll it tightly, so that the fabric is stretched to the maximum limit.
- Now, you have to open the bundle and place the jeans on a leveled surface like a table. Take a scissors, knife, sandpaper or pumice stone to scrape the inner side of the jeans. Scrape it gently in a horizontal manner and remove the fine fibers that are released by the fabric during the process.
- After scraping both sides of the legs, shake the jeans to remove the fine fibers stuck to it. Now, tightly roll the jeans and pound it with some heavy object in order to soften stiff jeans.
- The next step is to wash the jeans with hot water. One dry, repeat the washing, but this time add some clean sneakers along with it. The sneakers can help the softening process by removing starch from the fabric when they beat against the jeans.
- Remove the sneakers and add some fabric softener and rinse well. After washing and drying, you can feel the difference. Your jeans should have lost their stiffness and will become softer after wearing twice or thrice. You can try this method to soften your stiff jeans and make them more comfortable.
Even though distressed jeans are often used as a fashion trend, the process of distressing a jeans can help you with transforming the heavy fabric of your jeans to a soft one. You can make distressed jeans out of the stiff jeans you have. The process is almost same as that of softening, but in case of softening, the scrapping of the fabric was done on the inner side of the jeans. For a distressed look, you have to scrape the fabric on the outer surface. It may be concentrated to particular areas like knees and hems, or can be done uniformly. You can also adopt some special designs, according to which the scraping is to be done. You can go for some bleaching as well to get that classic faded look. Apart from being trendy, your distressed jeans have become less heavy and more soft, as compared to its earlier form. This is a good, often used method to soften jeans.
It is always better to try your hand on some inexpensive jeans for the first time. Once you are confident of the results, you can adopt this method and share it with anybody who is facing a similar problem. While softening jeans is an easy process, you should not overdo any of the above measures, as it can cause damage to your new jeans. You should also be careful not to hurt yourself in the process.
