If you’re inclined to crafting and making clothing, chances are you have a bag or box sitting around with bits of fabric and other scraps inside. If you’re like me, that box is constantly filled with new materials from friends cropping shirts and giving you the extras. Although it’s hard to find a moment to take time and create something during midterm season, my box of clothing scraps has been driving me crazy. As a result, I’m going to ignore my essay due date and get to work on whatever projects I can think of to jazz up my clothing. Today, I decided to try to figure out what to do with a couple of random denim pieces I had lying around.

I’ve had these two random strips of denim taking up space in my box of fabric ever since my roommate decided to crop the bottoms of her jeans more than a year ago. Neither piece is really big enough to make anything more than a headband, and I don’t really need two denim headbands — does anyone? I’ll admit, the idea of a denim headband, in general, seemed a little silly to me. This kind of denim really doesn’t have any stretch to it and really isn’t a great fabric to use for a headband, so it’s hard to make it stay on your head when you’re moving around. Regardless, I felt there was nothing else I could do, so what the heck, I made a headband.

Instead of making a traditional headband that’s pretty much just a loop of fabric, I made a little triangular handkerchief/bandanna-style headband! Think farm girl vibes, but weirdly trendy. This is what I did:

I used two loops of jean fabric cut from the bottom of pant legs, a needle, white thread, a little plain white elastic (optional) and scissors. That’s it. Definitely not doing any heavy spending on this project.

First, I cut the thinner of the two jean fabric loops to make it even all the way around. I chose the thinner piece because it would more easily fit under my hair and because I needed thicker fabric for the triangle part. To remedy the denim’s lack of stretchiness, I sewed a little elastic in the side of the jean loop that would go under my hair to make it fit tighter.

After that, I cut the second fabric loop into two equally sized pieces. I cut one of these pieces into a wide triangle, with the long end the same length as the other piece of fabric. I then sewed these two pieces together to elongate the triangle (for all you geometry nerds, technically it was a weirdly proportioned pentagon at this point). I wanted it to look messy and not too polished, so even though I made sure to sew the edge on the part of the headband that wouldn’t be showing, I left the frayed edge of the other piece of fabric.

I sewed this new pentagon shape onto one side of the original fabric loop, using the same technique to show only one frayed edge. Then, I had the finished headband shape! All I had left to do was cut off any uneven edges or pieces that were too frayed.

I’m super happy with how it turned out! To be honest, I’m not sure how often I’ll wear it because it’s a little less comfortable than some of my other headbands, but I think the design is pretty fun and funky. All I used for this was two scraps of denim, a needle, thread and some elastic, so I would definitely recommend you try making something similar out of your jean scraps!