Sewing: Putting a Zipper on a Completed Dress Jacket

I had made a jacket out of some nifty Hawaiian fabric, using a new pattern with which I was applying some of the skills that I learned at the Palmer/Pletsch Fit course.

I tried it on, and it was not satisfactory.

Oh, it fit quite well. But only if I consciously held the front edges closed.

My problem is that I generally like my jackets to be open. And when this jacket was open, there were some really ugly fold lines just below the front shoulder. I could not figure out what was wrong. It was not a case of the garment being too small. But there were some significant drag lines.

I pondered the situation for a few days. I decided that perhaps I should just get some cool closures. They could not be ordinary buttons, because the jacket opening was right at the center front - there was no overlap.

Once upon a time, I had a jacket that had parallel buttons down the front with a little chain between them. But I could not find anything like that, or anything that really appealed to me.

So I decided to go with a separating zipper.

The next issue: the jacket was complete. There would be no way to hide the zipper seam, unless I wanted to sew the zipper in by hand (NOT!!).

Having decided to sew the zipper in by machine, on the finished garment, meant that there would be topstitching near the edge. This garment had a separate interfaced center front band. So to appear attractive, there would have to be matching topstitching along the seam joining the band to the jacket front. And since there was a mandarin-type collar on this jacket, similar topstitching along the edge of the collar would be appropriate as well.

I really wanted to be sure that when the jacket is closed the zipper is invisible. Pinning zippers can cause things to warp a bit. So I used double-sided sticky tape to attach the zipper to the back of the center front band. This photo shows a bit of the tape where my finger is pointing.

This photo shows how close together the edges are after being stuck down.

I also wanted to be sure that the topstitching is even with the edge of the fabric, not the edge of the zipper. The best way to do that is to sew with the fabric on top, not the zipper. But when you sew a zipper in, you usually follow a seam guide line on the zipper tape, to ensure that you do not sew too close to the zipper teeth. I inserted a pin through that zipper seam guide line, and determined that a 3/8 inch seam allowance (or with the fabric just peeking past the edge of my usual presser foot) would be just about right.

This photo shows the topstitching in progress. Notice that the bulk of the fabric is to the right of the needle - an unusual place for it, but it let me use the edge of the presser foot as a guide.

I am happy with the end result. The zipper is not visible when it is closed. And because the jacket will be worn with the zipper closed, no one will see the non-standard zipper application.

This little exercise shows that, as in other parts of life, there are usually options to deal with a particular challenge.