On Design: Western Wear

Sept 3, 2009

By Susie McManus, Assistant Editor

Bull riding isn’t the sole spectacle that draws nearly 2 million attendees to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo each year. Not only does the annual show celebrate livestock and barbeque, but it also shows off Texans and their western wear. Though there is no official fashion show on the month-long event’s calendar, many attendees choose to spice up what they wear by customizing their clothing just a tad.

Jane Swanzy, owner of Swan Threads, an embroidery shop in Houston, has several friends who come to her with custom clothing requests specifically for the rodeo. Lucky for them, Swanzy loves adding fl ash to ordinary apparel to make it unique to each one of her clients. For this month’s featured embroidery work, Swanzy used several stock cross designs to create a pair of jeans with a one-of-a-kind flare.


“Originally, a friend came across a great pair of jeans similar to these [shown], and asked me to make her something similar, but using fall colors,” Swanzy says. “I checked to make sure the designs weren’t copyrighted, and discovered that they were all stock designs.” So Swanzy helped her friend choose the colors for the various cross designs she found at Embroidery Library, Great Notions and Starbird Stock Designs, and then embroidered a pair of her friend’s jeans with the designs. “Then another friend wanted a pair too!” Swanzy adds.

“My friends like wearing something nobody else has worn to the Houston Rodeo,” she says. “The jeans are appropriate for anybody that wants some type of fl ash on their jeans without having to pay the retail prices. Plus, I won’t repeat a custom design unless the customer gets permission from the first person I embroidered the order for.”

For other embroiderers looking to customize jeans, the best thing to do is mix stock designs from several different companies, as well as experiment with thread colors, Swanzy says. “Don’t just take one stock design and plop it on,” she says. “Be creative — combine rhinestones with your embroidery. The [goal here] is to come up with something you won’t find any place else.”

“The biggest challenge with customizing the jeans was deciding what thread colors to use,” Swanzy says. Embroidering the crosses in several colors wasn’t a hassle for her at all, though. “That’s the beauty of having a 15-needle machine. Everything I embroider is multiple colors anyway — I don’t like single-color designs that much.”  


Though sewing the crosses over the seams of the jeans could have caused a problem or two, Swanzy says her FastFrames made it much easier than if she had used regular embroidery hoops. “I also took the inside seam out of the jeans so I could lay [them] fl at,” she adds. “It could be done without taking the inside seam out, but doing so made it a little easier.”   

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