Sewing project progress: pink checked dress muslin, part III

When I was home for Thanksgiving my mom and I made a trip to the fabric store. There we picked up some sewing notions at deep Black Friday discount, most of which will end up as Christmas presents. The one bit I did bring back with me immediately was a long pink zipper for continuing work on my dress project.

The last time I tried to put a zipper in was on my red silk dupioni skirt that I made entirely by hand. Stupidly it did not occur to me that there might be some particular technique I should use to insert it, so I just sewed it in there like I thought it should be. It's not ugly, but it's much more visible than a zipper of that sort should be. So this time I actually looked up the technique for putting in an invisible zipper. My mom happened to have a home dec sewing book on the shelf at home, and it had a really good illustrated explanation that cleared things up nicely. It was these instructions that I followed. It worked well enough, but I made several mistakes that I hope to avoid in future zipper insertions.

First I sewed the two back pieces of the dress together with a long basting seam. Then I laid it flat to iron the seam allowances flat. My first mistake was that the allowances were probably a little too narrow for this job; in the future I'll have to make them wider, but it wasn't too big a deal. I knew I had to affix the zipper face down along the seam aligned in the center, but I wasn't sure how to affix it so that it would stay in its proper place while I sewed it. After considering several options I held it in place with a little stitch witchery, a fusible bonding tape, along one of the sides. Then I sewed a long rectangle around the edge of the zipper to fix it permanently. The book recommended using a zipper foot, which I'm not sure I have, so I just used the regular one. The stitch witchery worked pretty well, and was easy to pull off the excess after it was sewn.

Then I turned it over and picked out the basting stitches on the center seam over the zipper with my seam ripper. The edges of the fabric lay pretty nicely over the zipper, except there's a spot or two where the too-narrow seam allowance was not held in place by the stitching that holds the zipper. The only real issue is that I didn't realize until I'd done all this that I put the damn thing in upside down. I'm pretty sure it's standard for dress zippers to close up, but the way it is it has to close down. *Sigh* Stupid mistake. I don't think I'm going to fix it, though, as the fabric might not like the ripping and I'm probably never wearing this piece anyway. It's probably not unusable even so, and more importantly, lesson learned, which is the point of the whole exercise.