Wednesday 25 April 2012

april 24, 2012

whoa, it's late. i guess i'm not doing so well on my commitment to sleep from midnight to eight! ah well...at least tonight i had a good reason...

thanks to google, i found out that today was the birthday of the guy who perfected the zipper. his name was gideon sundback, and this would have been his 132nd birthday.

sundback didn't invent the zipper, but he significantly improved the initial design and made it more practical and functional. i guess you could say he's responsible for the modern zipper. its precursor, which was called the clasp locker, was invented by whitcomb judson.

after "unzipping" the google doodle earlier today (did you see it? it was so cool!), i decided that today was the best possible day to finally learn how to put in a zipper care of a lovely black and white strapless polka dot sheath dress that i inherited, sans zipper, from a friend in toronto. it took me a while to wrap my head around the process, though. thus, it is late late late.

i inherited the dress a couple months back. i hadn't gotten around to making a trip to the specialty store to pick up a dress zipper but i knew that, come hell or high water, i was going to sew a zipper into this dress. today! by hand! the girl at the sewing store was scandalized by the idea of putting in a zipper by hand, but i assure you, it went fine.

i love the zipper. literally and metaphorically. literally for obvious reasons it's a quick and convenient way to do up (and undo...) clothes and boots. it's also sexy. i mean, it has teeth that hold your clothes together for you! who wouldn't love that? beyond that, it's fun aesthetically. i love the zipper metaphorically because it's like a bridge that's constantly built from both sides. each side offers to go halfway, and that is reciprocated over and over again until the sides meet. each link builds on the last. there's a lot to be learned there.

in mending this dress, i started off with a backstitch, but i decided a regular stitch would be hearty enough so long as i was really consistent with my tension and stitch size.

my process involved using a lot of pins to anchor the zipper to the fabric as i sewed. the slow pace of hand-stitching pretty much necessitated that. i think i did pretty well the stitch could have been closer to the zipper, but this should work just fine.

check it out!















oh, and excuse the excessive amounts of cat hair on the dress. my cats wanted to "help" me with this project...and i generally humour them in all things :)




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