Its very simple. Although you may be scared to cut and handle knitting, the way I work with it in this tutorial is very easy and it does not fray or stretch when sewing.
You can do exactly the same thing to adapt a knit sweater to breastfeeding or some other shirt or dress that has a slightly thick fabric. There are also very original shiny, gold, invisible.... zippers that can give a special touch to our clothes.
Any idea to improve this adaptation of the dress to nursing is welcome. I am not much of a seamstress but I like doing handcrafts and in this case, I wanted to adapt a normal dress that suits me well to breastfeed, instead of buying one that would cost me much more and wouldnt fit my shape as I want. All I know is self-learning. Im sure there are things that I suggest that have better ways to be done and that could make the finish look nicer. I encourage you to comment to improve the tutorial.
Here are also the steps to follow:
-We need: a sweater or knit dress, two 20-centimeter zippers, a sewing machine, a special foot for zippers (usually included in the accessories that come with our sewing machine), scissors, needle, thread and pins.
-Try the dress on and decide where you want to sew the zippers.
-Open the zipper and place it on the finished side of the sweater. The idea is to open it from bottom to top, so well keep that in mind. We put it revesed and one of the parts overlaps the other. We hold it with pins.
-We baste each side three millimeters from the teeth and remove the pins.
- We machine sew putting aside the part that we are not going to sew so as not to catch it. When reaching the bottom, do not sew until the end of the zipper fabric. Only until the end of the teeth. Then the other side is made. We need to be careful and put aside the handle, and when sewing near the box, we should manually stitch it since that area is hard and the needle is not nailed.
-We turn it around and cut through the middle.
-We turn the zip over and zip it together.
- Then, on the finished side we have to sew five millimeters from the teeth. Both sides are sewn without pausing, drawing a rectangle with the seam.
-We put together the top stops with some stitches.
- Finally you have to give some stitches at the ends so that they do not undo and if necessary, put a bit of fabric over the metallic stops in case they are still visible.
-The other side is made exactly the same.