#537...bleached leather skirt

I got inspired by Christopher Palu's bleached leather collection on Project Runway Season 10, and decided to try bleaching leather for myself.

(This is Christopher)

(This is one of his subtly bleached leather ensembles)

For my own leather bleaching experiment, I started with this thrifted brown leather skirt from The Gap.

First, I decided the skirt was way to long for me, so I cut the hem into an asymmetrical shape. The nice thing about leather is that you can just cut in and not worry about hemming. (I did reinforce the seams I cut through with my machine.)

I got out my bleach and tried using a brush to flick some bleach droplet patterns onto the skirt. 

The pattern looked really cool, but when the bleach dried it was not noticeable at all. (It is still wet in the photo below)

So, I moved onto dipping the skirt in a bucket of bleach. I put about half of it in, and left it for an hour or so. Then I pulled some of it out of the bleach and left the bottom edge in for another several hours. It created sort of an ombre effect on the leather......sort of like what bleach did to my hair.

Here's the finished, dried skirt front and back

I wore the skirt to brunch yesterday