Zig Zag Zipper Dress

Hey!

I am usually not into using the same pattern repeatedly, but after stumbling upon some discounted bright turquoise blue double knit which I just had to have, I needed a simple pattern to show off the color and avoid visual overkill.

I immediately thought of my Zig Zag Znake Dress and McCall´s pattern 6243, view C.

Since the pattern was already prepared, I needed a few evenings to nearly finish the dress, but still had to stitch the last 20 cm of the hem by hand in a few minutes before a concert I attended last Sunday.

It seems now that this celebrated the last summery evening of this weird summer, where the weather has been into extremes only – either very hot and dry or then pouring rain like there is no tomorrow. The concert took place at yet another beautiful manor of Estonia, this time a wooden one called Kõltsu. If you are interested, check it out here.

I have used zippers for the diagonal seams. It was a random idea that occurred to me as I was wandering around the fabric store and trying to picture the dress in my mind. At first the idea was to use golden zippers for some extra bling, but the ones that I managed to find did not look nice when unzipped, the teeth appeared yellow instead of golden, as if the gold was only sprayed over the zipper.

I finally went with a matching shade and got two 80cm zippers, of which I only used a half on each diagonal seam. The hardest part was removing the zipper teeth from the seam allowances.

As you can see, I am repeating myself not only with the pattern, but with the color combination choices as well. I do have a LOT of shoes, but when it comes to turquoise color, I only seem to be able to match it with some kind of a pink. I also thought of a pair of golden wedges, but for this particular event I felt more comfortable wearing flats.

I am not very satisfied with how the dress looks on the backside. The nylon/spandex double knit is lighter in weight that the cotton one I used for the previous version (the Zig Zag Snake Dress). As a result I should be very careful with my underwear choices the next time I wear it and I am also considering adjusting the dress even more for my swayback.

The fabric doesn´t fray at all so there was a great temptation to leave the hemline and arm and neck holes unfinished. In the end I still went the traditional way and stitched them by hand but didn´t bother to finish the seam allowances on the inside.

The front zipper in more detail: