DIY: Bleached Shorts

This DIY will show you how to make your very own dip dye bleached shorts. Rather than paying a lot for these shorts in places such as Topshop, save yourself the money and give your old shorts a breath of new life!

What you need:

• Old denim shorts
• Bleach
• Distilled white vinegar
• Gloves
• Hanger
• Bowls/buckets

001. Fold your old pair of shorts in half, and attach them to a hanger like the picture above.

002. You want to make sure you have a bowl prepared in either your garden or bath, which is where you will add the bleach for your shorts to go into.

Making sure that you're wearing gloves, add half bleach, and half water into this bowl. Remember that the more bleach you add the whiter the shorts will eventually go. Don't go mad, as you want you shorts to be in one piece when they come out of the washing machine later!

003. Hang the shorts into the bowl of bleach/water. The white bleach mark on your shorts will actually be an inch or two above where it sits in the water, so don't smother it in the stuff!

As you can see, to make my life much easier I tied a piece of string from each tap on my bath to hang the hanger from. 

How long you leave the shorts in the bleach is totally up to you. I've done this twice and each time I leave them in for about 40 minutes in total. I wouldn't personally go over 1 hour in case it ruins and tears the shorts. Check every 15/20 minutes or so just to keep an eye on them.

004. Once soaked for a good amount of time take the shorts out of the bleach. You need to either get another bowl, or just rinse the bleach/water bowl out. In this bowl add half water and half vinegar. I used just normal distilled white vinegar that you can find at pretty much all supermarkets. 

I put my shorts in the vinegar/water and left them there for 10 minutes. You'll see the white colouring appear more in the shorts during these 10 minutes. 

005. After the shorts have finished soaking in the vinegar I put my shorts on a delicate cycle in my washing machine. Make sure that the shorts are the only thing in the washing machine.You don't want to be washing it with anything because of the bleach. Then dry them and taa-daaa! This is how my bleached shorts ended up: 

Once the shorts are bleached you can fray them a bit, add studs to them, and just go wild.