It's hip to be square!

Here's how I made my zipper pouch corners much squarer.


I ironed a hem on a little tiny piece of scrap fabric, then sewed this to both ends of my zipper. I used an iron-set glue stick to get the placement exactly right.


Here's a close-up, to show the seam and how close it is to the zipper stop. I used the zipper foot for this. I did a double seam for reinforcement -- just ran it in reverse along the same seam.

Here's what it looks like on the back side.


Now trim the zipper ends way back. This is about 1/8" away from the seam. Get them back to beyond where you know your seam will be when you're sewing the sides of the pouch.


Now you are only dealing with a piece of fabric when you turn your bag inside out and poke out the corners. A piece of fabric is, of course, much less stiff and much more flexible than the end of a zipper.


An added benefit: It sort of disguises slightly misaligned sides, because the little metal end pieces of the zipper are not right next to the corner to get pulled out of alignment, and because the added piece of fabric kind of blends out the colors of the two side panel pieces.


I am sure I'm not the first one to have thought of this. But it is cool!

Square corners!

It totally worked!


The trick was to sew a little piece of fabric to the zipper, running perpendicular to it, then to trim the zipper back to at least the middle of this piece of fabric, so that when sewing the seams of the bag the thread didn't actually run across zipper material at all. That meant that it was much easier to turn the corner, without that stiff plasticky zipper material in it.


I'll take some more process pictures tomorrow. It's way easy, but I mucked it up a little this time around. But the NEXT pouches...!