Solving the Mystery of the Zip Around Pouch

Tetrahedron shaped zipper pouch...

I'm sure you've seen this little guy before. It's basically a zipper tape covered with ribbon that zips up into a tetrahedron-shaped pouch... if you're successful.

It's an example of a relatively simple project that can seem unnecessarily complicated. I came across the tutorial from CraftPassion.com early on in my sewing journey and bookmarked it for "later".

A couple of years ago, I went through my long, long, long list of crafting bookmarks to do some major culling. While several links no longer went anywhere, it seemed like every third link was for a zippered pouch tutorial. No longer interested in such a vast multitude of them, I deleted most but did decide to save this one and take a closer look at it.

I hate to admit it, but I found it confusing.

A quick glance through the comments showed that I was not alone in my befuddlement.

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It's not as though it was totally baffling, but it's one of those tutorials that could have benefited from additional words, maybe some headings (i.e., Make the Base, Add Ribbon Loop, etc.) and/or more photographs at some of the important junctures.

With a little bit of thinking, you'll be able to work this out...

Also, Joanne (who is the extremely talented blogger behind the tutorial) is incredibly smart, but she left out information that probably should have been shared alongside the original instructions. For example, when asked — deep down in the (over one hundred) comments — about using other zipper lengths, she says to "divide your zipper length by 7 to get the approximate base width. Increase the ribbon width accordingly to get the correct proportion if your [base] is bigger than 3.5"... [base] width is determined by the zipper length whilst the height is determined by the ribbon width".

Another person asked about using a 22" zipper — which is what I had — instead of a 20" and she responded with the suggestion to sew the base at 3" instead of 2.75" in that case. Unfortunately, I didn't read that comment until after I'd finished mine.

However, in the interests of keeping the zipper intact for future use, I did not snip away the excess, as you can see here.

This is what my pouch looks like, fully unzipped...

It also wasn't clear to me that she had actually sewn the whole thing by hand when I first read the instructions. (Silly me, I was thrown by the term "backstitch", even though I know how to do it!) If you also hate the thought of doing all that hand sewing, let me tell you that there's actually only one spot that you really have to do by hand.

I've circled it here.

This is the only place where you need to sew by hand...

Everywhere else, including the two curved ends, can be done by machine. You can probably appreciate that the whole project takes a lot less time that way.

Here is the inside of mine, which is unlined. (You can also see the zipper ends that I didn't trim off, which of course, you normally would.) However, I'd like to say that if you use 5/8" ribbon, the interior will look quite "solid" and not need a lining.

This interior is unlined...

But if you do want to put one in, do as others have discovered and use some more ribbon to act as the lining, rather than fabric, which — IMHO — is more trouble than it's worth.

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So what did I need in terms of additional clarification in this tutorial?

You know how sometimes when you're tackling something totally new, that you want some reassurance that you're doing it right? Well, there are a couple of unusual things that happen to the zipper in this project that I would have liked to have seen a picture of... and not in a close-up view.

One of the things is this situation here.

If you study this picture, you should be able to figure out that part of the zipper
needs to be bent around itself in order to make this work...

I know. Weird, huh? But it's totally correct!

Let's put it this way, to understand how a zip around pouch works, you need to wrap your head around the idea that the zipper needs to be contorted into the opposite of how you normally see a zipper. That is, it's not two tapes with teeth in the middle, but two tapes with teeth facing out along the outside edges.

And the only way to accomplish that odd placement is to unzip the zipper and bend one side of the zipper tape back onto itself.

You do this at the very beginning to build up the base of the pouch. In the above picture, you can see that a few inches away from the zipper pull, one side of the zipper tape has been bent back along itself and wrapped right around the bottom end of the zipper. (And if one side is bent back and around like that, it will naturally be shorter than the other side, which explains the rest of what you see in the same picture.)

Make a loop by sewing the same ribbon in half and
inserting it just behind where the two zipper ends cross...

The role of the ribbon is to anchor the two zipper tapes — now adjacent to each other but not able to be joined up by any zipper teeth — so they can function as one strip.

It took awhile for me to understand this concept, so I created (my first ever) infographic to explain it. Please feel free to save and share!

An infographic explaining what's under the ribbon of a zip-around pouch...

Once you understand this part of the internal construction, the rest of the "how to make" is super simple.

The original tutorial takes great pains to explain how to mark the locations to achieve a tetrahedron shape, but I found that it pretty much takes care of itself if your measurements are correct and you're clear about what you're doing with the zipper and ribbon. (Basically, at some point, you'll run out of zipper tape on one side and will need to wrap the other side back onto itself in the same way as you did at the beginning. The two zipper tape ends come together to form the top corner of the pouch when you pinch it into the desired shape.)

With a much, much longer zipper and no need to "pinch" a four-sided tetrahedron, you can make a regular flat rectangular pouch using the same underlying principle. There's a tutorial on Craftpassion for that too. (Do a search for "zip itself" on the site and both posts will show up.)

Enjoy... and if you are similarly stumped like I was, maybe my infographic can help!