Final Tips for Sewing a Zipper Backpack

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Karen for Expert Village. Now you are going to take the sides and fold it over to the edge of the zipper. So the fold is going to fold where the top section ends. So all this fabric would fold right over like this and you want all the edges to be even and put in a few pins. Now this is a lot of thickness. You want to make sure your machine can handle all the thickness you have here. That is what it looks like. Then on the other side you do the same thing and pin that in place. Then we would sew across the whole top of this being very careful with our machine. Make sure it is not too many thickness for our machine and being careful not to run over this hard part of the zipper and cause our needle to break on the machine. So I like to feel there is nothing extra in there, any bulk that might bother the machine. Place it on with a regular foot, remember you are using a heavy duty needle and a normal stitch length two and a half and a straight stitch. We would start going very slowly, test with your hand how thick the fabric is and if your machine has difficulty getting through the thickness. I have backed up a little, you see I'm going very slowly just taking it a stitch at a time. Make sure the machine can handle the load. Get my zipper a little even and go over very slowly, very carefully. You might want to do a couple of reinforcement stitches by a zipper cause the zipper would get extra stress points. Just a little back and forth would give you reinforcement. When you are going over the bulky parts you just want to go nice and slow stopping whenever it feels like the machine is having difficulty. When you come to the end you want to back a few times to knot that. Now again if you want extra strength on this you could run again with your machine over the top for a little extra reinforcement. Now all we need to do is turn our bag right side out. So you want to flip (I have some extra threads here I'm going to snip out). Flip that whole bag right side out. Put your hands in the corners, poke your corners out and there is our front zipper. This is how you get into the bag like that and this is our zipper strap that when you unzip it it separates into two straps that you could wear as a backpack. Then this is the front part that if you wear it as a backpack this is the part that is showing. "