I'm sewing a dress. How do I keep hold of the zipper from bunching up? I'm sewing a dress with a zipper down the front. It turned...
I'm sewing a dress with a zipper down the front. It turned out fine, but the zipper make bumps all along the dress! How do I prevent this?
Answers: Several possibilities:
1) You stretched the material as you were inserting the zipper. Cure: cut seam allowance surrounded by the zipper area at 1" instead of 5/8" (1.5" for sports zippers), interface the zipper nouns seam allowance with the lightest solidity fusible interfacing you can find. Insert the zipper, making sure you baste in the zipper on a flat surface near none of the garment hanging bad the table (pin baste, hand baste or double-sided "Collins Wonder Tape" -- dampen soluble double stick tape -- great stuff for beginners)
2) The stuff shrank because it has progressive shrinkage or you didn't preshrink your material.
3) The zipper tape shrank because you didn't preshrink it. Very infrequent now, as most zipper tape are polyester.
4) You used short stitches, causing "thread jamming". What
happen is that the shorter stitches pushes a lot more thread into
the material parallel to the selvage, and the fabric bubbles because of this. One of the most adjectives sewing faults I see near home sewing is stitches that are way to short for the material. For a shirt weight cotton, I'd probably start near a stitch length of about 3 mm, which is 7-8 stitches per inch. Thicker fabric, longer stitches.
Fabric handling and thread jamming are the two most likely culprits, ime.
Pin it down since you sew it and make sure your tautness is right on your machine.