Another Monster and a Zipper Tutorial

So I made another orange jacket. This one has a red zipper. I got a comment from the last one asking if the Jalie pattern has facings. I realized that I do the zipper in a coat quite a bit differently than any directions I have seen. So I decided to throw it out there for you folks. All pictures are small sized but you can enlarge any them by clicking on them.

First, I sew together the jacket sans hood. The hood goes on last to hide the top of the zipper.

Sew on the first side. When sewing I remove the other side of the zipper. When I am done sewing one side, I put the zipper halves back together and mark where seams need to match. I used yellow chalk pencil. I circled it in the picture. I do this so the seams line up on the outside. The blue line in the above picture is where I sewed the seam. No, it is not really blue. Red thread on red zipper tape does not show up very well.

Here is the chalk dot I put on the top to mark the top edge of the zipper.

Here is the result after I sewed both sides on. The inside are just raw fleece and zipper tape right now.

I serge the tape to the fleece. Make sure no part of the jacket front gets in the way. You are just doing this to finish the edges of the tape and fabric.

Then I topstitch on the top to hold down the zipper tape. I put my needle down on the top of the fabric. Then I pull up the fabric to see where the stitch will be. I like my topstitching to hold down the majority of the zipper tape.

In this picture you can see where the needle is when I lift the jacket. I do this instead of trying to measure the distance. It works better for me this way. I do a lot of topstitching this way actually. It works well with bias binding tape.

Here is the inside after I sewed the topstitching. I added the blue lines.

Here is what the top looks like after topstitching.

Here is the inside.










I don't do anything special to the bottom of the tape.