Lately, thrifting has regained its popularity. But it can be pretty difficult to find the perfect clothes at the thrift store. A great alternative for this is to upcycle your clothes. Upcycling is using old clothes or materials to create new items of greater value. In this article, I will give you some tips on how to upcycle, enjoy! 

Upcycling gives your clothing a second life. Instead of throwing your clothes away you can make them into something else and make the item look brand new. Upcycling is also very cheap since you can use a lot of materials from your own closet. Next to that, it is a great way to express your creativity, and knowing how to upcycle or sew is always useful!   

If you want to start upcycling, the first step is to find clothes that you can upcycle. A tip is to take a look in your own, your parents’, or your grandparents’ closet and pick the clothes that are not being worn anymore. There could be more stuff in there than you think! Every piece of clothing is great to use in its own way since upcycling is not just making a piece of clothing more fitted. You can make upcycling as hard or easy as you want. Some items I recommend you use for upcycling are fabric scissors, needles, thread, pins, and a sewing machine (if you have one). As said before, you can use every clothing item for upcycling, but since that will be a lot to talk about, I will show you what you can do with a pair of pants.

There are many things you can do with a pair of pants. You can make your jeans into shorts, by simply cutting them off at the length you wish for. Do you want to give the ends of your jeans some frays? You can wash your pants to create these after cutting them or use the sharp edge of your scissors along the seams. You can also make your pants longer! It is very easy to do, I will explain how to do this in a few steps. 

Step 1 turn your pants inside out. At the end of the pant legs, there are seams. Grab a seam ripper or another sharp tool and cut the seams open. 

Step 2 pull out all the threads. 

Step 3 iron your pants to remove the fold line. Now your pants are longer! 

Of course, there are many other things you can do with these and other clothes. What I do to find inspiration is to look around and see what other people are wearing. Another thing that I do is watch videos on TikTok or YouTube. Some people I check out for inspiration are “Coolirpa” on YouTube, “Blueprint DIY” on YouTube, and “DIY don’t buy” on TikTok. By learning how to upcycle I created some pieces that I am currently wearing on a daily basis. Such as a hairband and several tops. 

Personally, I love to just try things out for myself. However, everyone has their own way of learning how to upcycle. What I recommend is to try out different ways of learning how to upcycle and then choose the learning way that is best for you.