Tailoring & Clothing Alterations - How to fix a separated zipper

Hi, I'm Debrah DeMirza and I'm at Deluxe, a resale clothing boutique in Eugene, Oregon and today I'm going to show you how to close a separated zipper. Sometimes you'll find that at the, your zipper pull comes off and you don't have to necessarily replace the entire zipper, you can just put that back on. What you can do is go to the bottom of the zipper and unstitch it if you need to just slide it on the bottom. If it's too complicated and you have so much different sewing here you don't want to ruin your zipper, but if there's a missing tooth or something at the bottom, what you can do is take scissors and clip just right above where that missing tooth is or right where that missing tooth is, clip it into the zipper a little bit so that it gives you a place to put your zipper pull back on. So what I did is I just undid the sewing here, and what you what to make sure when you're doing this is to make sure that you line it up so that the top of your zipper is going to be where you want it instead of being off a little bit. So what you want to do is just slide your zipper pull, make sure it's going the right direction, onto the one side of the fabric or the zipper and pull it right up to where the teeth start. Then with the other one, either if you had it cut there you would do the same thing, but I'm just sliding it on the top here, I mean on the bottom of the zipper and what you want to do is make sure again like I said that you match it up usually where you see the zipper is even there that's going to make it an even area at the top of your zipper. What you want to do is work it, you might have to kind of like move it back and forth till you get it to go again and if it's, there it goes and you want to make sure again that it matches up at the top, which this does and you want to make sure you don't pull apart this. What you do is you undo the little zipper closure thing at the bottom and what you can do is you can take that off with a screwdriver, you just kind of pry up the little prongs and take pliers to open it out so that you can actually set it right back on the zipper, just a little bit above the first teeth. Then you just push it back into the cloth on both sides and then when you work it back through smoothly, you just take your pliers and you just pinch the zipper prongs, the little prongs back and flat so that it's not going to poke you, just keep doing it until it's sitting flat. You want to make sure that you don't work those too much because it'll break the little pulls off, it'll create metal fatigue. Then you have it back in place above where your missing tooth is and then you have a brand new working zipper. That's how you close a separated zipper.