The First Stitch to Sew a Zipper on Fabric

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Candi Cane Canncel with Expert Village. In this clip I'm going to show you how to do a railroad, regular zipper. Railroads kind of a vintage fancy word for it so the first thing you want to do is take your zipper. You want to take your fabric and measure out the length of the zipper. So I'm going to go ahead and put a pin where the zipper ends and you actually want to mark it where this little metal zipper stop is. But just pull it up a little bit cause when you are stitching, you don't want to stitch on this because that is sure far away to break your needle. So what we're going to do is the first part where the zipper is going to go we're going to put in what's called the basting stitch. A basting stitch is just when you take your stitch length and put it on 4 or a 5 it's just a temporary stitch. It's just going to hold the fabric for as long as you want it in there and you can just go ahead and pop it out with a seam ripper. Once we get to this point we're going to back tack by reversing and then we're going to change our stitch line to a 3 and then continue all the way down. So we'll take it to the machine start with a 4 and we want to do a fairly large seam allowance about 5/8 of an inch. When you get to the very end, you can pull the pin out put it on the 3 stitch back tack and then keep going all the way down. Once you have your basting stitch, the next step is pressing it and actually pinning the zipper in to get ready to sew."