As I was getting dressed in my Happy Clover Dress one day last summer, I was pulling up the zipper… and it broke! I don’t remember exactly how it broke, now that I stop and think about it months later… I think that the pull came off of the teeth, or the pulling part came off of the part that grips the teeth… I don’t remember precisely, but needless to say, it was broken.
Below: the Happy Clover dress with its original zipper.
The original zipper was repurposed from a 1980s dress I took apart to make a 1920s beaded dress back in 2013 (a post about making that 1920s dress, including photos of the 1980s dress before I took it apart, can be seen here).
With the broken zipper, the dress wasn’t wearable! So on the day that is broke, I changed my outfit and put the Happy Clover Dress in the to-be-mended pile. Not long after that I bought a new YKK zipper in matching shade of teal. And then… the dress and zipper sat there for about 9 months…
Fast forward to May of this year and I was really tired of looking at my large mending-and-alterations-to-do pile (is that sounding familiar yet?)! I want to get back to sewing some of my larger projects and am craving both the physical space and mental release of completing the mends and alterations in order to do that.
So… that led me to finally put the new zipper into the dress!
Yes, the zipper is in! Just as before, it is centered and topstitched. This is due mostly to the fact that the zipper nestles under pleats in the back skirt, which means that it has to be sewn in two sections–the bodice section and the skirt section–to keep the pleats form being sewn down with the zipper.
You can see that in the photo above and you can also barely make out my extra backstitching where those two sections of stitching meet in the photo below.
Here’s a closer photo of the fun teal color of the new zipper!
And that’s it! Just in time for warm weather, the Happy Clover Dress is back in action! Yay!
The Quintessential Clothes Pen 