Zips, Buttons and Fastenings

ask a room of lapsed sewers what stopped them and zips come up more than anything except tension. the fear is misplaced. a zip is a strip of tape with interlocking teeth and it sews on like any other trim; what people lack is the two or three specific tricks, and those are learnable in an afternoon of scraps.

a zip has teeth (or a nylon coil), tape, a slider, a top stop and a bottom stop. closed-end zips are for cushions, pouches, trousers; open-end zips split apart entirely for jackets. invisible zips hide their coil behind a fold of tape so the closed seam shows nothing but a pull.

The centred zip

the teaching method and still the honest workhorse for cushions and pouches. sew the seam closed with a long basting stitch where the zip will live, press it open, and you now have a perfectly straight placement line with the zip hidden behind it. tack the zip face-down over the pressed-open allowances, fit the zipper foot, and topstitch a rectangle around it from the right side. unpick the basting and the zip appears through the slit. every difficulty in zip insertion is solved by that basted seam: it holds everything still and straight while you sew.

The invisible zip

the elegant one, and counterintuitively the easier one once the special foot is on. the zip goes in while the seam is still open. press the coils flat-ish from the wrong side (cool iron; the coil is nylon), then sew each tape to each seam allowance with the coil rolled into the foot's groove, stitching right in the fold line. close the zip, then sew the remaining seam up to meet it, starting as close to the zip's end as the standard zipper foot allows. from the right side: a plain seam with a pull at the top.

Buttonholes, the one-step way

any machine from this course's era makes buttonholes nearly automatically. the real button sits in a cradle at the back of the buttonhole foot, the machine sews a sized rectangle of dense zigzag with a bartack at each end, and you cut it open afterwards with a seam ripper, pin placed across one end so the blade cannot overshoot. always sew a test buttonhole on a doubled scrap of the project fabric first, and always interface the buttonhole area: a buttonhole in floppy single-layer fabric puckers.

Buttons that stay on

machine or hand, the principles are the same two: anchor well, and give thick fabric a shank. by hand: six passes through the holes over a matchstick, remove the stick, wind the slack into a stem, finish with three knots buried under the button. by machine: zigzag set to the hole spacing, feed dogs dropped, a dozen stitches. the sew-a-button side quest covers the hand version step by step if you want it drilled.

a 45cm cushion cover with an invisible zip along the bottom seam and, because this course is about fastenings plural, a buttoned inner flap you will never show anyone. two evenings, one of which is mostly pressing.

Cut and prepare

two squares of medium-weight fabric 47cm by 47cm (1cm allowances, snug fit on the pad, which is what makes a cushion look plump rather than sad). fuse a 3cm strip of interfacing along the bottom edge of each square on the wrong side, where the zip will go.

The zip goes in first

press the invisible zip's coils gently open. mark 5cm in from each side along the bottom edges. sew one tape to each panel between the marks, coil in the foot's groove, right sides together, stitching in the fold line. close the zip and check the two panels hang level; unpicking now costs five minutes, later the whole seam.

Close the box

with the zip half-open (or you cannot turn the thing), sew the remaining bottom seam sections from each corner to meet the zip stitching, then the other three sides. clip the corners diagonally, turn through the zip, poke the corners out, press.

The buttonhole drill, smuggled in

before stuffing the pad in: on a doubled offcut, sew three one-step buttonholes for three different buttons from the jar, cut them open, and sew the buttons opposite them with proper shanks. keep the sampler in the machine drawer. it is your reference for every future buttonhole, and making it inside a project means it got made.

fastenings unlock the projects people notice: cushions in fabric you chose, pouches with zips that run true, shirts whose missing buttons come back the same evening. the two capstones ahead lean on this weekend, the pyjamas lightly and the weekend bag heavily.

• Made to Sew (YouTube): the invisible zip method taught with the clearest camera work on the fold line you will find
• Professor Pincushion (YouTube): every zip insertion method demonstrated, plus one-step buttonholes across different machine brands
• Evelyn Wood (YouTube): buttons, shanks and hand-finished fastenings from a tailoring perspective