Self Directed Project Final Evaluation

Erica Rupp

BA (Hons) Costume with Performance Design

Level 5

Self Directed Project

Final Evaluation

I feel like I have learned more working on Self Directed Project than any other unit we have had this far, not just about costumes, but about myself as well, which I really appreciate. I have produced one 18th Century men’s peasant shirt, one pair of 18th Century men’s peasant breeches, and one Victorian ladies’ blouse for the Costume Store portion of the project, and two finished wigs for figures five and six and some dyed netting  for figure three for the Rebels dance group for Breathe, accompanied by the blog http://sdpericar.blogspot.co.uk/, to include this evaluation. 

The first thing I worked on was the 18th Century peasant shirt, which was the simplest shirt and I expected to be fairly easy, but I ran into several issues. First, I had trouble with getting the placket straight and I found out how bad the fabric snagged. Then I accidentally got some green dye from a shirt I had screen printed from Battle for the Winds on the shirt and had to re-cut the shirt front, placket and cuffs. Then I was behind in construction, and ran into yet another problem when it came time to gathering the material for the cuffs and collar, but particularly had problems with the collar. I took hours out of a few weeks during making breeches and again with the blouse, first trying to get the pleats to look right, then getting them to stay in while I attached the collar, then top-stitching the collar down, but even on my final attempt it still wasn’t looking as good as I wanted. 

The breeches were also quite difficult, mainly because they were made out of a very thick wool which was hard to fold, and the main decorative element of the breeches was a pointed strap on the edge of the flap, so trying to get it to actually look pointed was difficult. I also had a bit of a problem with making the pockets, especially the welt, due to the thickness of the wool, and I didn’t notice until the welt was finished that the stayflex i had lined it with to help keep the shape wasn’t actually cut straight along the top so the welt isn’t straight either.

The Victorian blouse has been an absolute nightmare. It is exceptionally more difficult than the other two pieces, and the tiny 1/8” pleats nearly killed me. With the original tacking, pinning, sewing, pressing, then unpicking, removing all threads, untacking,  pressing out all the pleats, re-tacking much more careful and small, carefully pressing, pinning, sewing and re-pressing all the pleats, I spent at the very least a total of 20 hours on that alone. I’m only now working on smocking when the entire piece should have been finished. 

For Breathe, it was extremely late in the project - the fifth out of only eight weeks - before I actually officially knew what I was to be making; at the beginning we didn’t have designs, then after we got the designs, it was a while before we decided which designs Emma and I would be working on, so until then, we worked on hoods and ideas for knee pads which ended up getting sourced, and then there were a couple other weeks before it was officially decided that I would be making the headdresses for fig.5 (blue dreadlocks) and fig. 6 (mixed-media multi-coloured dreadlocks), along with the net I dyed for one of Emma’s skirts, which only left me 3 weeks to do everything, and each part of this took so much longer than i could’ve anticipated.

What I learned about myself is that apparently I’m still not terribly effective yet at directing myself - because I wrote my work plan I sort of didn’t pay attention to it, and when I kept running into problems with my work I kept procrastinating dealing with the problems, falling further out of schedule with my work plan and causing an impossible amount of catch-up work at the end. I usually do procrastinate, but have never had it catch up on me like this before and I seriously need to work on time management. I grossly miscalculated the amount of time it would take to finish literally every piece I’ve worked on for SDP.