A couple of years back, I made a bangle bracelet out of blue jeans and epoxy that one of my daughters “claimed”.  Since then, I’ve been thinking about doing another project like that, only bigger.  A friend of mine gave me an old pair of blue jeans that I could cut up, which I hung on to.  I also had a pair of work jeans that finally got too ragged to wear, so I decided it was time to try again.

Below is the finished product.  It’s about 6″ wide and maybe 4 1/2″ deep.  I started out using epoxy and 6″ squares to make the lower half of the bowl, then switched to making 2″ wide strips in a chriscross pattern.  My thought was that I’d be left with a 2″ square, hollow, center in the bowl, which would save on materials.  As I laid the strips in a square patter, however, the corners of the bowl ended up being twice as thick as the center of the strips, so I had to readjust.  I finished up making 4″ strips, that way the ends wouldn’t overlap.

If anyone is dumb enough to try this, there’s a couple of things to keep in mind.  First, I’ll warn you that the jeans have to be absolutely soaked in the resin, or it’ll leave a weak spot in the blank that will bend as the lathe spins.  For this bowl, I had to end up adding resin to the side of the bowl after the rough turn was done, letting it soak into the jeans, before doing the final turning and sanding.  Second, even though the blue jean material is soaked in resin, it still produces a LOT of dust while sanding.  My shop looked like someone murdered Levi Strauss and there were little bits of blue jean dust floating in the air.  Remember to wear some kind of ventilation and an air cleaner/dust collector is a must!

Pretty pleased with the end result.  The two pairs of jeans I cut up for this were different shades of blue, which comes out in the finished product.  I also decided to add a finish to this, but that ended up darkening the whole bowl and obscured the blue jean look a bit.