Marine surplus jacket to sweet hoodie

Have you ever look at one of those army jackets and thought "that would look totally sweet with a hood!" Well i have and i did something about it.

Step 1 Distressing the jacket

Now I am simply giving you suggestions on what you can do to distress the jacket. OK the first thing that i did was to give the jacket a faded appearance by soaking it in a five gallon bucket filled about 3/4 of the way with water, with about 2 or 3 cups of bleach for an hour or two maybe even more depending on how faded you want your jacket to be (my jacket did not fade at all probably because the canvas that the jacket is made of is very strong. ****Disclaimer**** bleach can destroy your fabric and also your eyes if you put it directly on the fabric or you get too close to the fumes BE WARNED. Then i washed and dried the jacket, after that i took a jerky chew container (jerky chew you can get at pretty much every gas station for around a buck and a half, it is also WAY better than regular jerky), stuffing it in a pocket and sanding around the edges with a medium grit sand paper (third a fourth pictures) next i took my knife and scraped it perpendicular to the fabric so the serrated blade scraped of a layer of fabric at a time. I did this along the front edges and at the elbows and back bottom edge. Also, and this i do not have pictures for, i took this out to the back and beat it around with a bat and some chains and threw a couple of logs at it more or less only tiring myself out. Canvas is very strong.

Comments

[Yerboogieman]

Nice, I made a backpack out of mine, then when I got tired of that, I made a laptop sleeve.

[NetReaper]

Wow, that looks great. good idea, those jackets are available for pretty cheap.

[madara009]

wow i searched jacket and this came up i looked to my left and there was the jacket with out the hood(i bought this at an army surplus store a few days ago), o ya and there not mariene jackets the paratrooper jackets(mine has all the patches on it) im glad i came across the because i was going to bleach then dye it darkish red but since that wont work ill do something else

[999592]

Actually (not to be rude) this is my brothers' jacket and he was in the marines :)

[madara009]

ooo hmm... i guess theres not much need to have very diffent clothing so there just use the same stuff

[999592]

Could be true... But have you ever seen the rivalries between the army and marines or navy? I don't think that they would use the same stuff.

[madara009]

wow good point...i dont know what to say

[999592]

Unless of course they were government issue... but i seriously doubt that

[talonsblade]

actualy the marines and the army did use the same jacket for a whilem now that everyone has gone to digital camoflage it has changed but they use the same set for a while, the only diffference realy was the hat

[999592]

Who knew that hats could make so much of a difference!

[BigCommieNat]

Man! It's nice to see the old (anti?) styles come back! I can remember how many years I got out of an old army field jacket... that thing was awesome! good write up, and good subject! The jacket you have, I should note, is rip-stop nylon. The checkerboard grid pattern gives it away. No amount of bleach will fade the color. If you get the cotton jacket (no checker pattern in the fabric) i'd probably try 1/2 cup of bleach to 4 gallons water... and rinse/wash immediately thereafter. I've had many the t-shirt ruined by sanitizing solution splashing on it, and that's only 1 tablespoon per gallon! Thanks again!

[999592]

AAH thank YOU for pointing out that the jacket would not fade. However i did do something that you might like( i did not have time to document it properly) I used brown and green spray paint to give it an aged look since the bleach did not work so try it out!