Give Your Khaki Jacket A New Year DIY Update

Lay your jacket flat on a work surface, since we're painting, it may be best to cover with a cloth or old newspapers to avoid any spillage disasters!

You want to firstly create some of those great abstract stripe sections across the left side of the jacket. To do this, measure the approximate lengths from edge to edge, avoiding the pocket. (We left the pocket on this side blank, just like the Versace version)

These measurements don’t need to be perfect, but they will give you an idea of how big you will need to draw your stripe templates. We used a piece of A4 paper, looking at an image of the jacket for reference and played about with various stripe shapes and lengths.

Cut these out and place around the left side of the jacket, you may need to cut the ends to a straight edge where the template hits the hems.

Using a biro pen (we wouldn’t usually draw directly onto a jacket with pen, however with this neonprene material, the line can be neat, and this actually gives a great barrier for the fabric paint, so it doesn’t run and bleed into unwanted secctions of the jacket.) Draw around your stripe templates, in a neat line. Even make dots with the pen at first then join these up neatly.

Next, we’re going to create more paper templates, this time in large and smaller leopard print shapes. We drew out the abstract circle-like shapes freehand, looking at our inspiration photo if needed. These don’t need to look like anything at the moment, but the sequins we add later will make them more leopard-print shaped!

We placed the larger spots at the top right of the jacket, and the smaller ones on the right hand pocket. We liked the layout of one pocket being embellished and one not, like Versace’s, but you can add the pattern wherever you’d like.

Now, to begin filling in the stripe sections with fabric paint. Decide which colours you’d like to use where, we used purple at the bottom of the jacket and orange at the top. Always follow the instructions that come with your fabric paint.

We lightly dipped in our angled brush and got painting! The paint will sink into the jacket a little, and the first coat may look a little patchy, but don’t worry, let it try and repeat for a neat painted section.

We then painted the large and smaller spots on the right hand side a dark green, using the biro outline to keep our painting neat.

Once we were happy with all our painted areas, and they had dried completely, we followed the instructions that came with our paint to ‘seal’ the jacket, making it rain and splash proof! To do this, we covered the painted area with a clean cloth and ironed on a very hot setting for 1-2 minutes. The great thing about this fabric paint is it remains super soft, so doesn’t feel as if you have a hard painted area when you're wearing it...

Once the painted areas were finished, we started on embellishing some of the striped sections. Placing fabric glue into the striped sections, we sprinkled sequins and pressed lightly to set them. We did this in both red and purple. Once the glue had dried, we simply shook off the remaining sequins.

To give one of our purple stripe sections some extra pizzazz, we added an outline of contrasting green glitter along the edge, simply by gluing in a neat line, and sprinkling glitter until covered.

To turn the right hand pocket spots from mere blobbs to leopard print, we wanted to add a contrasting purple glitter to the green. Google image a leopard print if needed, the key is to glue some absract shapes around the outer edge of your exhisting spots, and when covered with glitter, will give you that leopard look we’re after.

For the larger spots, we lined half of the spots edge with single red sequins, gluing them precisely and neatly in place.

To add even more of the bright colour clash like our inspiration jacket, we cut into our large green sequins, creating abstract shapes, and added these to the painted orange stripe section, again, you can do as many painted and sequin areas as you desire. We say the jazzier the better!