An experiment

"Scientist by day, seamstress by night." That's how I describe myself in my profile. Of course, these are not completely separate identities, and sometimes my sewing activities are strongly influenced by my academic nature. Those of you who have followed my blog for a while know that I like to experiment. Sometimes the result is great, sometimes it's rather, well, explosive.... (read the story about exploding wool here).
Anyway, I came up with a new idea and thought it would be a nice experiment to see if I could turn it into reality. And since I was on a roll, I decided to write this post in a scientific way too. At least some of you - fellow researchers- might appreciate that.

So here we go...

RESEARCH QUESTION
Is it possible to turn discarded jeans into a wearable and cool quilted vest?

DESIGN
The envisioned design is sketched in the Figure below.

The aim was to design the vest with a continuous pattern. Thus, there would be no side seams or shoulder seams. The hood would be created by attaching the two back middle strips to the front middle strips. The pockets would be hidden in the pattern.

METHOD
Materials Several pairs of discarded jeans, in various shades of blue, thread, a 50 cm zipper, half a yard of lightweight knit, half a yard of batting

Procedure. The flowchart of the procedure is displayed in Figure 1.

1. As a first step, the jeans were cut into parallelograms (width: 13 cm, height: xx cm, angle: 36*). Next, several lay-outs were tried. The optimal lay-out was determined based on peer feedback gathered through a small survey on Instagram.
2. Then, the parallelograms were attached in long strips, and next the strips were sewed together.
3. The fit of the garment was tested on the end-user. Several seams were opened using a seam ripper, and the fit was adapted.
4. Step 3 was repeated multiple times
5. The zipper, lining and waistband were added
6. The armholes were finished
7. Step 3 was repeated (grumble...) 

After completion of the process, end-user feedback was gathered. In return for payment (2 marshmallows per end-user), photos were taken (weather conditions: slightly overcast, 18 degrees Celcius)

RESULTS

The end result of the experiment is shown in the remaining Figures.
The envisioned design was realized completely. With respect the wearability, the experiment was quite successful. 

The vest turned out slightly too big for end user 1, and way too big for end user 2, but considering the growing rate of both users, this is not too problematic. 

With respect to the coolness, the first end user gave a score of 6 out of 10, whereas the second end user gave a score of 10 out of 10.  

CONCLUSION

The experiment shows that it is possible to turn discarded jeans into a wearable and cool vest (according to two end users). The process took a fair amount of time, and the seam ripper was used frequently. Nevertheless, I'd like to conclude that this experiment was successful.