The Fashion Show Project: What to Do with a Broken Zipper

Minutes after a photo shoot, I say to my ham-handed, though ever helpful husband, "Please get Sydney out of her dress."

I'm busy fiddling with something else, so time passes, but when I finally turn back around to him, there he is, with his hand on the zipper to Sydney's Trashion/Refashion Show dress, and a look on his face that must be genetic, because I see it every day on the faces of our little girls when they are caught in the act of doing something very, very naughty.

"What?" I say.

"Um, the zipper," says Matt. "I broke it."
I don't know how he could have thought that pulling that hard was how the dress was supposed to unzip, but my man, he managed to break the zipper pull in half and rip it off of the zipper. Yikes.

Do I even have to mention to you that the very last thing in the world that I want to do is tear out the invisible zipper on that dress and sew a new one in? The VERY last thing in the world? Especially when, if I'm being completely honest with myself, I did make an error with my seam allowances and the dress is already just maybe a millimeter too snug for my liking?

Hmmm, hmmm. What to do? What to do? Thinking... Thinking...

Hell, the fashion show jury already thinks that my kid's outfit is too sexy. Might as well add a lace-up back to the mix!

I hate, hate, HATE my snap setter, which bends my snaps every time I try to set them. From what I've read, this particular snap setter does work for some people (though not for most, I wager), but it apparently takes a lot of practice and futzing and the reading of extra tips on line, which I do not currently have time for. However, it punches grommets like a dream, and so given a choice, I often make lace-up stuff, as in the following:

First you take off the rubber rings and use the pokey part of the tool to punch a hole in your fabric:

Trim away the bits of fabric that you just punched out, then set the eyelet or grommet in the hole, with the finished-looking flat side on the right side of the fabric and the pokey side poking through the hole into the wrong side:

 
Set up the pliers so that the flat side of the grommet is against the pokey side of the pliers, with the post going through the hole in the middle of the grommet, and squeeze the pliers together:

Perfect grommet!

What, you didn't want to see the finished dress, did you? Well, I'm not putting that dress back on the baby until fashion show dress rehearsal, so you're just going to have to wait.