Crazy Pants: How to Bleach Tie-Dye Jeans

I love black jeans.  And I've been rocking the same pair from Stylemint for the last couple of years, but the downside of black jeans is that with too many washes, they become faded to a sort of dark-grey-wannabe-black.   Exhibit A:  my old jeans on the left.  Exhibit B:  those jeans compared to the new black ones I just got.  So faded!  (See what I did there?)

But I love, love, love these jeans and how they fit, so I wanted to find some sort of way to salvage them.  For some reason, the idea popped into my head to bleach them.  Tie-dye bleach them.

I looked up a few tutorials on the interwebs ("how do you bleach jeans") and every one seemed to have a different idea of how much bleach and how long to leave the jeans in, so in the end, here's what I did:

I balled up my jeans and held them with 5 rubber bands, then dumped them in a bucket along with that entire small bottle of bleach, which was about 10 cups, and 27 cups of water (I came by these numbers simply by what was needed to cover the jeans in the bucket.  Science!).  I left the jeans to soak for 3.5 hours.  Important notes when using bleach:  wear gloves and do it somewhere well-ventilated!

I took out my jeans and squeezed them out as much as I could, then refilled the bucket with clean water and let them soak for about 10 more minutes.  Then I squeezed them out again and laid them out to dry for a little while in the sun.  They looked insane:

Something about the bleach and the color of the jeans created three colors:  the faded original black, violet, and a dark ivory!  My obsession was immediate.

Then I put the jeans through one "rinse only" in the washing machine, followed by a real wash with detergent by themselves, and these wild things are the final result:

New favorite pants, NO DOUBT.