What Can You Do with an Old Pair of Blue Jeans?

One of the many ways we can experience joy in the post-petroleum era will be from the sheer, unadulterated pleasure of living frugally. We will re-discover what our grandparents and great-grandparents did without thinking about it to stretch a dollar (or a Euro), to keep an extra mouth fed, and yes, to make the most of an old pair of jeans. So here goes:

  • Keep wearing it. You look cool (dare we say sexy?) in old jeans.
  • Mend it. Maybe all you need to do is to sew a seam in a strategic location or two and you’re decent again.
  • Cut off the legs and make shorts out of them. Hey, they tell us It’s going to get warmer.
  • Patch it. Yeah, you can just sew the patch right on.
  • Give it to a friend.
  • Sell it for cash.
  • Cannibalize them for patches for other jeans (and other garments).
  • Save the zippers. Zippers are amazing things.
  • Save the buttons.
  • Save the seams and make rope from them.
  • Save the seams and turn them into a denim rug.
  • Give the scraps to your kids so they can learn to sew on them.
  • If scraps are too small to use, put them in the compost.

What have we left out? Send us yours, and we’ll add them (probably).