jean zipper to button-fly

The zipper on my jeans went from problematic to straight-up broken. It started as just an errant zipper and ended with me trying to 'fix' things with a pair of pliers. The result was misaligned teeth and the mesh coming undone.

Instead of ripping the zipper seams and sewing in a new one I decided to modify these jeans to have a button-fly. This simple clothing mod took me less than 30 minutues to make and gave my jeans a new lease on life. The best part is that when the jeans are buttoned up like look just they did before, no one is the wiser!

Here's how I did it!

Step 1: Remove old zipper

I considered removing the seams that hold the zipper in, but realized I wouldn't be able to achieve the same stiching as the manufacturer and elected to just remove the exposed portion of the zipper ribbon. With a sharp blade both sides of the zipper was removed.

Comments

[anezinis]

good idea but the butos is ugly

[annieannie]

you just saved me from tossing out a favorite pair of jeans because of the zipper broke!!! Yay :)

[franki11]

So an old trick we used as kids was we would run the thread through wax to coat it and make it stronger (we used cotton thread) It was great for buttons that were under a lot of stress (like button flys;-))

[canida]

Nice fix! I prefer button-fly jeans, but they're a bit hard to find these days.