My household has this thing about denim; we can just about spell it with our names abbreviated, so we've christened our hose the DENiM House. Since several of us also own Denim jackets, I thought it was high time that the furry, four-legged member of our tribe joined the gang with a bit of denim of her own.

My plan was to use up some old, worn out jeans for material. I first saw this idea online, and I figured it was too easy to mess up: Simply cut off one leg of the jeans then cut two arm holes and BOOM! Instant doggy vest. Not so fast...When I tried this my jeans were too skinny. I could barely get it over her head. Back to the drawing table.

With one pant leg now spent, I had only one other shot to get it right, so I tried to make a template with some old newspaper. This didn't go so well for either of us. (Actually, the whole day was probably a nightmare for the dog.) The newspaper template was torn apart well before it could tell me anything useful.

I decided to just wing it. I knew that I needed to make pant leg wider, so I cut the it open at the seam, and measured out another piece of material to add to it. The hem at the base of the pant leg became useful as a hem at the bottom of the vest, so I made sure to line that up across both pieces, then I used my roommates sewing machine to sew them together.

Here's the finished product. I went down to a fabric store to get the button, and sewed the button-hole by hand. I'm told the sewing machine could have done the button-hole too, but I just didn't know how.

 And now, for the final reveal...

All in all, I think it came out about as well as I could manage. It was one of those bored Saturday, one-day projects, so I'm just happy to have completed it. Now I just gotta get my house to pose for a cheesy 90's style photo wearing Denim on the front porch of our house...