The fabric warehouse near our house has an assortment of zippers, but it can be tricky digging through the bins to find a zipper of the appropriate type, length, and colour. They also sell zippers by the yard, and will thread on as many pulls as you ask for.

I picked up a few yards of zipper tape months ago as an experiment. I've used the zippers on a number of small pouches already. It's so convenient being able to just cut the length of the zipper I need instead of sifting through a stash of pre-cut zippers.

Today I was sewing a large pouch that needed a 21″ zipper along one end. One side of the zipper had escaped the zipper pull on the segment I was working with, so I opened the zipper and removed the last two zipper pulls that were on it. Then I realized I had no idea how to get the zipper pulls back on.

Youtube to the rescue! I followed this tutorial:

After a little bit of wiggling, I got the zipper pull onto the coils. The new zipper pull zipped the zipper closed behind it. Hooray!

Bonus: Because I had left the bottom part of the zipper closed, by the time I had moved the zipper pull to the middle of the segment I had stitched into the pouch, the zipper pull was basically in between two closed parts of the zipper. This made stitching over both sides of the zipper much neater than it would have been if one of the sides were open, like the way pre-cut zippers are.

2016-02-05a Zipper pulls and zipper tape — index card #sewing

I love how easy it is to find all sorts of practical tutorials on the Internet. It's a small thing, but it's nice to know that I can deal with zipper pulls and zipper tape. It means that I can buy zipper tape by the yard and never have to worry about having the wrong length, and that I can make large containers without being constrained by the pre-cut lengths available in the fabric stores. Yay making things!