Early last December when I was in the throes of preparing for the upcoming holiday, I posed the question: Can these jeans be saved?

In my search for an answer to that question, I cut the former favorite jeans into strips:

which I then washed and dried, leaving me with a continuous (sort of) fabric strip with which to crochet:

After detangling the blob of denim strips pictured above, I found that not all of the seaming had held together well.

Undeterred, I got out an 8.0 mm hook and attempted to crochet with the resulting fiber.

To put it charitably, the result was less than spectacular. I carefully frogged the stitches I had crocheted with my surprisingly fragile denim yarn, wound it into a ball, and set it somewhere in my crochet empire, and promptly forgot where exactly that somewhere was.

Then a couple of days ago as a result of my continued effort to bring order to the chaos that is my crochet empire/guestroom, I found the fabric strips that I had made from my former favorite pair of jeans, and I had been preparing for the day that these denim strips surfaced.

While my effort to crochet with the fabric strips had not gone well, these jeans were my favorites for a very long time, and I was not going to give up on them easily. I had decided that rather than crocheting with the strips of denim, I would crochet an open fabric and weave the strips of denim through the open fabric.

To that end, I made two swatches.

The first made use of a common stitch pattern that is described in The Adventurous Crocheter as “the sweater stitch.”

Using an H hook and Red Heart Super Saver shocking pink, I began with an even-numbered base chain and worked a single crochet stitch into the second chain from the hook. From there, I chained one, skipped the next chain and worked a single crochet stitch into the next chain. I continued in this fashion until I got to the end of the first row, making a single crochet stitch into the last chain.

From there, I chained one, turned the fabric and worked a single crochet into the first stitch, chained one, then worked a single crochet into the next single crochet stitch from the previous row.

I did this until I had a sufficiently large swatch and even number of rows. Here is the completed swatch:

Using the same hook and yarn, I then made the filet crochet swatch pictured here:

Then I wove strips of the fabric through the open weave of the sweater stitch:

and the filet crochet:

I particularly like the look and feel of the sweater stitch grid with the fabric strips running through it, and as soon as I settle on the perfect color yarn, my favorite jeans will indeed be transformed into a scarf I really like.

For me part of the magic of crochet is the journey, and this project has been (so far) a very interesting journey.

I can hardly wait to see how it ends.