Top Stitching for Center Zipper

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Karen, for Expert Village. And now we can topstitch. When you're topstitching you want to try to match your thread as good as possible, they have just a huge variety of threads in a fabric store, and you should be able to match just about any fabric that you have. It's a good idea to try to match the original threads that are there, so if the manufacturer of the garment has it matched exactly to the color of the garment, you really want to match exactly the color of the thread that they originally used so that you'll have a nice continuation. Now, if you're unable to find an exact match of the thread, you may want to re-topstitch with whatever color you were able to get so that you'll have a continuation of the design - that you won't see that there's a different color thread here and a different color thread there. So you would topstitch all the way around the garment, and any other place that you felt would make it look like it was original. Now you want to carefully place (now you're going to have the zipper pull in your way), and you want to place the foot as close as you can to the zipper pull without going on top of it and you want to try to topstitch on the original topstitching line. You can see the mark of it right here where the stitching used to be, and you want to to continue your stitching on top of that stitching. So you line up your machine, make sure that your stitch length is set to a normal stitch length, (one that matches the original stitching), and we'll just back up to knot it, and then stitch our zipper in place following the original stitching line. Okay, when you get down to the bottom of the zipper, you want to pivot, and you're going to sew right over the zipper teeth if they are plastic teeth, and you want to go very slowly until you reach the next corner. And then again you're going to follow the original stitching lines up the other side of the zipper, carefully remove the pins as you go, and checking occasionally to make sure that everything is laying flat, and there is nothing in the way underneath. Okay."