Final Evaluation

I began this Self Directed Project intending to develop my knowledge of tailoring and working in the music industry. I've created a final costume following these guidelines which isn't fully completed but that I have made to the client's requirements to the best of my ability and will continue to complete it after assessment.
This project has been non-stop. I began very early with research and designs and got onto making as soon as possible, partially because I was very keen and excited about this project and also because I knew it was going to be difficult. I underestimated how long every piece of this costume was going to take to complete. My lack of knowledge on how to make a suit and several other obstacles occurred making the process take a lot longer than expected. I feel that after this project, I’ve now bettered my knowledge of making Jackets, but other than the lining and following patterns out of a book, I don’t feel I’ve ‘tailored’ it in the same way we did tailoring in Defining Practice. I feel I could have done better in the making but now with this practise behind me, I will do better next time.

I feel I’ve coped fairly well to a time plan and that my organisation skills have been on top. There have been areas that challenged the time plan, such as the embroidery took a lot longer to do than I had expected and because it wasn’t originally planned, it had to be fitted in. We had to arrange fittings in London with all makers and all band members which I felt were planned very well. Considering these fittings were also unsupervised by a tutor, I feel we all coped extremely well under the pressure of nerves and fitting costumes that we weren’t completely sure how they were supposed to fit. We had to be extremely critical of our work in order to make sure it was right and we worked strongly as a team in these fittings to help each other.

We’ve done well to work as a team throughout the making process as well; we’ve always asked each other’s opinions before any changes to costumes were made and we tried our best to keep similar themes within all of the costumes so they will all look different but still link together.

There’s a few areas that I felt could be improved. At the beginning of this project I made sure that it would be possible to create a full suit with no previous experience and was informed that it would be fine. Although there were tutors to ask for help when we needed it, it would have been better if there had been structured work-shops alongside the one-to-one tutorials. This way we would have worked together a lot more and learnt the correct way to make each part, instead of going in different directions and at different paces. And it means that we would also have been learning the proper tailoring techniques as we needed to do them.

I feel without work-shops, a lot of what we created was based on guesswork, the lining and the jacket pleats especially, which results in wasted time. But I feel that by making these mistakes, the correct way to make will now stick in my head more than if I had just been told how to do it. The downfall of putting the lining in wrong has resulted in the lining not being great quality as it now has a few marks and tiny sewing holes in some areas of the fabric.

The benefits of this project have been the chance to design again, researching into a new era that I haven’t studied before, and learning how to make a costume that I’ve had next to no previous experience with. These are all aspects that I’ve loved and I will benefit from them.

I still have to finish the costume for Joseph Fielder, and will do when I get the costume back after assessment before The Riley’s next gig. I will need to finish the trousers – putting in the zip with a placket, herringbone stitching up the bottom of the trouser legs and possibly putting in pockets. And I need to finish the jacket by sewing button holes and the buttons on. I’m glad I haven’t had the time to put on the buttons, this way I can put the costume on Joe again and double check that I’ll be putting the buttons in the right places. For the gigs, I might also change the waistcoat. The one that I’ve bought didn’t match the trousers, so I attempted to dye it black but the dye didn’t take. I will either re-dye it again using a synthetic fabric dye from the University, or find another waistcoat suitable.

At the beginning of this project I was adamant that I wanted to continue studying tailoring in Level 6 and after University. I’m now unsure whether I would enjoy tailoring as much as I thought I would and therefore need to get more information on what next year will involve and where I can work after University before I make that choice.

Finally, I feel I’ve created a good costume that meets what the client has asked for, and despite being unfinished, it will be completed before it is needed for any performances. I don’t feel the costume is perfect, but I think I’ve done well to get it to the point that it’s at. In time as my knowledge and understanding of making garments develops I will find a project such as this easy, but for now, as my first attempt at a suit, it’s been extremely difficult and stressful and I will seriously contemplate how much work I can realistically complete before I take a project this big on again.