Invisible Zipper - Part 1

Last week’s sewing project left me pretty distraught. I stayed up late doing the dress a few nights in a row, which still didn’t turn out right. I started out thinking this will be a simple project, since the pattern says “vogue very easy”. I asked my teacher if it’d be too easy, she quickly shook her head. I thought ok.

The dress was pretty easy, except the gathering at the skirt and the invisible zipper which I will not learn how to do for a few more weeks. There is a lot of fabric to be gathered for the skirt, which can easily be caught in the machine during sewing. “patience…patience”, I kept telling myself. The zipper is the real problem. Actually I’m just scared of zippers all together, but I thought I would reverse engineer it and follow the hand out the teacher gave out. Um…that was not quite what happened.

Let me just say, the night before the class I made some irreversible decisions. The next day I took the dress to class. The dress didn’t look bad when I put it on, except the zipper in the back which I covered with a cardigan. My pearl and pink shoes went well with the pink dress. So I did what I do best, I sold it like I believed it when I had to go up and talk about my dress.

Some classmates gave me great compliments. I think the pearl necklace really helped. However my teacher noticed some things aren’t quite right, such as I left the edge of the dress at the bottom raw…..yeah….um….I guess that would be a “design feature”. In reality, I spent all the time on the zipper and didn’t finish the edge.

The rest of the week, I was feeling like a failure. Remember the irreversible decisions? Well, what I did was I cut some extra fabric at the waist line to make the zipper fit which means it would be hard to redo the work. I was able to fix garments before by taking out the stitches, but this time I cut the fabric and there’s no going back. Now what?

Well, all is not lost so long I have my faith. I went fabric shopping on Saturday and saw this pink organza. taDA! A light went on in my head. I don’t quite like the length of my dress and the skirt is a little see through with the fabric. I can cut the skirt shorter at the waist line (where I irreversibly made those cut) and add another layer of organza. here's my sketch, going from right to left.

What’s even better is next class, we are asked to bring our garment to class to work on it, so I will ask my teacher to show me the zipper and get the extra layer of organza on top. On Sunday, I was back at working on the dress. The stitches are out, I’m ready to go!