I haven't posted a tutorial, or a how-to for quite some time now, so I thought I would hop back on that train and teach you guys something new ! 

There's a million different ways to do this, but this is just how I distressed my jeans, with some tools that I had lying around at home. 

So of course, start out with a pair jeans that you want to give a badass edge to. I chose this pair of blue jeans that I picked up from the thrift store. They're originally from guess. 

It's a little hard to see but on my right knee (in the above picture) I used a sharpie and drew two black lines. This is how large I want the distress to be. For this specific one, I lined it up with my knee. 

Then, you can pick another place you want distressing. I ended up only doing two holes, one on the knee, and one on my left upper thigh, as you can see above. 

So here are the tools I used. A pair of sharp scissors or fabric sheers, tweezers, and a nail file. It was definitely quite a bit harder to work with the nail file, so if you want the job done quicker and easier, opt to go out and buy some sand paper or a sand block. I just didn't want to spend extra money on this project, so I spent a little extra time and effort and used my nail file. 

So the first thing I did was take the nail file and sand down the fabric where I want the hole. Make sure you sand around the two lines (above and below) and not just within the lines, because once you start making the hole, the roughing will not show anyways. The reason you want to sand down between the lines is just so the threads might pull out easier. You'll see what I mean in a bit. 

So with our scissors, cut along the two black guidelines we drew. This is where the sharp scissors come in. 

And then between those guide lines, start cutting the fabric into strips. You can do as many or as little as you want, it will all come out to the same result. Here is where you decide the width of your hole and the shape. If you want a certain part to widen then make the cut longer, and vice versa. 

So here is the tedious part. You see that little blue string that's on my middle finger. You're going to pull all of those strings out of the pants. So you see where the bottom of that peice of string is? there's a little gap in the blue jeans. A long the edges of all the cuts you made, you'll see little blue strings fraying out. Take your tweezers and your time to pull out each individual blue bit. 

Jeans are made by these little vertical blue strings being woven into horizontal white strings. By pulling out the vertical blue strings, we are leaving the horizontal white strings intact, creating the "distress" look. 

Take your time pulling these strings out. Don't try to pull out too many at a time. I usually do one at a time or two at a time. When you try to be hasty and pull out too many at a time, you can accidentally rip the horizontal white strings, which will mess up the distressing (if you rip too many).

NOTE : don't do this on your bed. It took me forever to clean up all the little blue strings afterwards ): 

And after all the pulling of strings, if there are still edges that look a little too straight, I would go back in with the nail file and rough up those edges a bit. 

Go ahead and also rough up the edge of your pockets and put some distressing in the back pocket as well to complete the look. 

So this is the end result ! the whole on my upper thigh, aaaannnnnndd....

... the one on my knee. I made this one a little more open and 'exposed' just because I really love the look of big distresses at the knee. 

Hope you guys enjoyed this little how-to, 

more soon,