Mastering the Separating Zipper and Then (Finally) Refashioning My Sweater

Ben's coat zipper died.  Last year (I cringe) I threw away a coat with a broken zipper. 

This year, I found a good tutorial online and went for it.  This was after I kept eyeing that dang zipper and thinking, in my naive way, that it didn't look that hard.  Guess what?!  It's NOT HARD - in fact, I would say putting in a separating zipper is easier than a regular zipper!  It's much more intuitive, for one thing.  There's also much less chance of sewing on the zipper teeth accidentally and breaking a needle.

So I fixed Ben's coat.  Then I took a deep breath and cut up my lambswool crewneck sweater.  I've been all talk about this project for close to 2 years now (scaredy-cat).

The sweater is a lovely material and color, but I hate to commit to crewnecks because what if I get too hot?  Then I have to wiggle out of it, and by this point in winter, I'm getting tired of putting on all those clothes and I want easy layers.

I cut off the sleeves and slit the sweater up the middle.  I expect I'll use the cutoff sleeves as filler for hotpads.  I finished the newly-raw edges with bias binding.  I treated the sweater as if it was made of woven fabric; this was not successful with the armholes, which sagged out quite a bit.

So I made darts under the the armholes, to pinch in the excess.

Then I put in a bright green separating zipper.  I am so pleased with how this turned out!  Especially with my hefty Gap  men's flannel shirt from the thrift store.