Zippers

I dread zippers, even more than I dread buttonholes. My first project in high school home economics was a tote. Two days after I started using it, the zipper broke. In hindsight, I blame the cheap zipper that the teacher sold us off of a roll, but it was the start of my hate/hate relationship with zippers. 

I went on to make a skirt with a zipper. It was part of the matching skirt and blouse set with the perfectly matched plaid and the bias pockets. (And buttonholes, although there weren't that horribly many of them.) The zipper was the only thing that didn't come out right, and it was the last zipper I did until I made the cat bed and wanted to be able to remove the stuffing so I could wash it. Rereading that post, the process must've been even worse than I remember.

I've been avoiding zippers successfully for years. I'll see a pattern for a neat tote bag and tell myself that zippers can't be that hard. And then I'll go on to something else that I know I can do. Like a quilt with three hundred curved seams. Those don't scare me.

Teenage Daughter found a tutorial for a skirt, and dug out the fifty zippers that I bought at an estate sale for two bucks. So I've been sewing zippers. The first one took five tries. I sewed that thing every possible wrong way except for upside down and my brand new seam ripper is so dull it won't cut thread.

The zipper in the second skirt went in with less hassle. It probably wouldn't get a good grade from my home economics teacher, but it's a wearable skirt. Which I can't show you, because she's going to be writing about it on her own blog.