Unzipped

from sarah the sewist

Sometimes things go wrong and you just want to give up. Generally, in sewing, given that it's not really a life and death sort of thing, that's the path I choose. In fact, I have been known to give my husband a pep talk or two about how it's okay to just stop a project that is just not working. He is yet to take my advice, but he hasn't been sewing that long.

When I got my August issue of Burda World of Fashion, I was excited about the nice-looking pair of jeans in this issue. Unlike a lot of BWOF stuff, there was no weirdness to these jeans (not that there's anything wrong with weirdness)---they were just a normal pair of pants. Around that same time my mom (who taught me everything I know about sewing) bought me three yards of amazing charcoal and black herringbone corduroy. (I have a long-time love of all fabrics that are textural like this---herringbone, houndstooth and plain old tweed all make me very happy.) This fabric and the Burda WOF pattern were destined to be together.

These pants came together very well, which I have come to expect out of the Burda magazine patterns. (I actually think that their World of fashion patterns have better drafting than their envelope patterns---although that could also be because I get the chance to "get to know" the pattern better in the magazine because of the tracing and seam allowance addition.) They looked great. I especially liked the way that the pockets turned out. I even recreated the waistband, since this was one of their "plus" patterns and the waistband was waaaaay larger than I needed, and made it wider and contoured. I thought I was pretty awesome. Oh, and I did all of this in the span of a single evening.

Then I got strep throat. (Yes, strep throat at 30---fun stuff.) So I didn't hem them for about two weeks after they were basically done.

Last weekend I pulled them off of their resting place on top of our Gumdrop Ottomen in our living room and hemmed them up. I tried them on and they fit great. Really great. They were slimmer fit than I had expected, but I've noticed that's a trend with BWOF, so it wasn't that surprising. But I did think that the zipper seemed a bit sticky. Not thinking anything of it, I wore the jeans around the house. Then I heard it...pop, pop, pop. Oh, yes, I had managed to install a defective zipper in my pants. The teeth, it turns out were completely warped, bent like they'd been stepped on and twisted. While only two or three coils actually popped completely out of the zipper, most of the other were not long for this world. So, I did what any sane person would do... I screamed a lot of stuff that would not be appropriate to repeat in this blog. Then I ripped the whole stupid zipper out, not thinking, of course that I had no idea how on Earth to re-install a zipper.

Anyway, I won't go into the details of my drama with trying to put the new zipper in the pants, but let's just say it took pretty much an entire week to figure out. And---the horror!---it involved me hand sewing. Which is pretty scaring. I got the stupid thing in the jeans and functional, but it's really not that pretty, to be honest.

But, the jeans do look pretty good...


Anyway, this is a great pattern, and I'll probably use it again. I'm pretty proud of myself for not being a quitter with this one, although it was my instinct. I did learn two things through this whole mess, though:

1. Always check your zipper coils before you use the zipper.
2. Through my searching for a solution to this problem, I discovered that there are professionals (tailors) who will fixed broken zippers for you. Next time (I really hope there's not a next time), I'll go that route.