Burda 6-2009-120 Women’s Shorts – Entry 3-Low Zipper Fly Without a Waistband

Oh boy.  These directions in Burda for this zipper installation are soooooo confusing.  It’s made my head hurt for  a few days.  I keep trying to visualize what it is they are saying.  Long story short, the zipper installation on this pattern is a little bit different because there isn’t a waist band and the zipper sits about 1-1/2″ below the top of the shorts.

I know…how does that work?  And where does the button attach to for the closure.? There was some head scratching here but eventually I figured it out.  The key essential piece is the Fly Extension…something that is just mentioned to cut a rectangle in the directions.

After looking over as many directions as I  could for installing a fly front zipper…I never did find directions for exactly what I was looking for btw… and including pulling out some of my favorite pairs of pants to use as inspiration I decided the best explanation was the Reader’s Digest Guide to Sewing — Men’s Zipper Fly.

I actually constructed this using a combination of the Reader’s Digest version, the Burda version, and making my own pattern for the fly.  The fly pattern was going to be the big critical step.

However careful I was I still did run into trouble and thought some of the steps were out of order because I had to go back and take some stitches out, insert zipper tape, then re-sew but other than a few tweaks it worked and I like the result.

This is something I definitely think needs a really good step by step photo or video tutorial on.  It really is a unique fly-front.  I’ll think about putting one together…maybe…eventually.  It would be good to have that in the database collection for sure if I ever run into that again!  All in all the most difficult part was figuring out what to do…really…the installation was straight forward once all the parts were correct.