Practical Things

Holidays are coming up soon and its time to think of gift bags. I use zippered pouches for that.

My supply is running low so I decided to work on that. Before sewing the pouches I needed to collect the supplies. Zippers and fabrics. I like to create zipper extensions it makes it easy to then sit down and create a bunch of pouches in one sitting.

I spent a while batch sewing zippers between 2 strips of fabrics which I then cut apart.

Took out boxes of upcycled zippers. All sorts of colors and sizes. I chose a selection of neutrals, most of them metal zippers upcycled from pants and jeans and spent today adding zipper extensions to about 50 zippers.

I work in a production line system, placing the zippers on a strip of fabric one after the other and sewing the edges down

Sewing zippers on to fabric strips

I need to do this 3 more times. I normally sandwich the edge of the zipper between 2 layers of fabric but because these zippers are upcycled the extensions beyond the metal teeth are all kinds of different sizes and I don't want to sew over the metal teeth. So today I need to see where the teeth are when I place the zipper down on the fabric.

I cut the fabric strip between each zipper and one extension out of the 4 needed is attached.

Cutting

One fabric strip sewn

I sew the second piece down and the top extension is done on one side of each zipper

One zipper extension done

I then sew the extension fabrics on the other end of the zipper

Sewing the second side

Almost done one more side to go

Production line zipper extensions

When I finish I will have about 50 zippers with a fabric extension on each one waiting to be sewn into lined fabric pouches.

The zipper ends are sandwiched between 2 layers of fabric

Zipper ends sandwiched between 2 fabrics

After cutting between the fabric pieces this is what a zipper with fabric extensions looks like

Zipper with fabric extensions

Now the zipper is the same size as the fabric pieces for the pouch