Keeping it together with zippers

I recently got to save two different expensive items of clothing with some easy zipper fixes.  Whoop! Zippers are amazing inventions; we see them every day, and yet most of us don't pay much attention to how they work, so I thought I'd draw some pictures to illustrate my own understanding (and how I use those pictures to make quick-n-easy zipper fixes).   

We often talk about the "teeth" of zippers, but it's more like one side of a zipper is a stack of spoons, that lie on top of each other, but but with a bit of extra space in between the bowls.

My very fancy drawing of a bunch of nested spoons.
Also, much like one side of a zipper.

When the two sides of the zipper come together, the spoons on one side and the spoons on the other side interlock tightly, so they can't (usually) come apart in the middle; the normal way to separate them is by lifting them off the top (or dropping them off the bottom).

The left and right side of zipper teeth.
Again, note the amazing art work.

As long as the bottom and top are held together and the spoons (teeth) are in good shape, the whole zipper hangs together as it ought to.  The bottom part is sometimes held together with a special slot and post (like on a jacket that you can unzip all the way), or it's sewn together (like on your jeans, or on the V-neck bike jersey that my husband asked if I could fix).   The top is almost always held together with the zipper pull, which is another ingenious contraption.  It's basically a ham sandwich, with the ham turned vertical instead of horizontal.  The two pieces of bread are what keep the zipper teeth/spoons flat as they come together, and the ham is the part that guides the spoons together or apart, depending on which way it's sliding.

A zipper pull: two nearly flat pieces of metal
(like two pieces of sandwich bread)
held together by a vertical bar.
I guess I forgot to draw the pull tab on top.

For both of the pieces of clothing I was repairing, the zippers and the pull were still in good shape; it's just that the left and right sides had come apart and the zipper pull was a third piece.   

For my husband's bike jersey, the easiest way to get these back together was to use my seam ripper to snip a few of stitches holding together the bottom of the "V", slip the zipper pull up along the two newly-free sides of the zipper, and then quickly stitch the bottom of the V back together.  It took . . . maybe 2 minutes?  Less?  Pretty quick.

A sketch of the back side of the jersey,
showing the stitches I snipped and then resewed.
(Jealous of my fabulous art skills, yet?)

Bike jerseys are very, very expensive (at least by my standards), and zipping them up snugly is crucial for comfortable bike riding, so I just want to say that this zipper fix made me very frugally happy, as it forestalled a pricey purchase.

The boots whose zipper I repaired are gifts from a friend/acquaintance; she discovered that I have the same size feet as her and that I don't mind -- in fact, I love -- getting other people's castoffs.  They're super comfy, and very "me" colors . . . but the zipper pull popped off the top.  (There are supposed to be little metal bulbs at the top that keep the zipper pull from going too far, but they disappeared somehow).  

For the boots, I couldn't get at the bottom of the zipper to reattach the pull that way, so instead I manually stacked the teeth from the bottom myself:  left, right, left, right, left right . . . it was kind of like building a house made of playing cards; if I got distracted from doing it, the left and right sides would just peel apart and take me back to the beginning.  So putting these together turned out to be a neat exercise in focus and attention.  

Once I realized that, it took about a half a minute of careful concentration, and then I had the zipper together from bottom to top, at which point dropping the zipper pull into place was simple.    

My teddy bears approve of the discrete white button
at the top of the boot zipper.

To keep the zipper pull from coming off the top again, I sewed a small white button at the very top of one side.  (No one but you, me, and my two teddy bears will ever see that button, I'm guessing, but at least three of us thinks this repair looks fine).  And now my awesome boots are back in action.

In commemoration of this amazing set of repairs, I wrote this little poem.  (Also, because I haven't written  a poem in a while, and feel like such an activity is long overdue).  For posterity:

It helps to remember, with big Thought Balloons,

To zip things together, the teeth are like spoons.

They pile up tightly, above and beneath,

Those spoons of the zipper which some call the teeth.

If it rips, 

try some snips,

Then re-clip 

'til it grips;

sew the strips, 

So it zips.