Materials

I'm going to make this clear from the offset:
I am a COMPLETE novice.
This is my entry to the competition last year:

Ok, it's pretty nice. It's better than a lot of people could do, but in terms of technical skill it was no where near the level of a lot of entries.

Regardless of this, how the hell can I be considered a novice?

How about this?

This simple dress, classed as being suitable for a "beginner" to make, is the first thing in the 10+ years I have been making clothes that I have ever made without any flaws.

I wish I was kidding. Even my wedding dress was riddled with flaws, which I managed to hide on pictures on the day.

So yeah, I can sew. I can make things which look pretty good from a distance, but I also have patterns in my stash labeled "confident beginner" which I tried to make one time and messed up too much to try again.

So this is a big deal to me.

I've made part of a Victorian ensemble in the past, but it SUCKED. Again, it looks OK on pictures, but really - it's a big nope in person.

This skirt and overskirt I shared in my first post - it looks pretty good, right? Not the best, but pretty cute, at the very least. Well the next time I am in England I will take some pictures which show that it absolutely is not.

So my mission with this project is to create something which doesn't suck - I want this to be well made, and believe it or not I am sure I am going to mess up many times along the way - and I can already predict where.

I am going to approach this differently to anything I have made in the past, because I am sure that the mistakes I make are not entirely because I am devoid of skill. It took me a LONG time to get to a decent standard with my corsetry because I used to rush everything, and I am 99% sure this is why I struggle with other things, too.

Choosing to try and make the wasp dress means I won't just rush into making up the patterns, I will have to consider how to use them, how to alter them, and how to make sure the finished garment doesn't look ridiculous for the wrong reasons.

With that in mind, the first thing I need to do for this project is calculate what materials I need so I can try to source them. The patterns I am going to base the outfit on do have yardage, but I want to make some adjustments to the overskirt pattern, and the fact I am going to be making it with stripes that I will have to create myself makes it more difficult.

I am going to have to try and salvage the underskirt I already made, so I will take this into consideration when I see how much of the gold fabric is left.