After the first week of my senior project, I have been delighted with the course it is taking. Living up to my expectations and dreams as I have already completed a pair of pants that took over 10 hours to make. My goal was to learn how to alter, repair, and create garments, and I am doing precisely that. I am so grateful and happy with how this first week has started. I wasn’t sure what to expect coming into senior project as I have little experience in garment construction. Part of me was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to learn the skills and apply them well as fashion is more complicated than it looks. But now, after this first week, I realize that fashion and garment construction is still complex but something I am very able to do and perfect with a lot of practice. Throughout this week, I have discovered new sewing techniques such as Japanese boro stitching as well as many other basic hand stitches. I have found how to attach buttons, snaps, hooks, eyes, what patterns are, and how to read them, which will be helpful for this coming week as I want to move to create an original piece. I feel excited for the coming weeks as I am ready to practice and improve my newly learned skills and create clothes that reflect my vision and desires. Making clothes has always been a dream of mine since a kid. I had a youtube channel with my friend in middle school. I would create designs for merchandise, nothing special, just simple designs on tee shirts, but my dream at the time was to wear clothes that boasted my brand and channel that I could be proud of and say that I made and designed them. And now, learning and getting equipped with the skills to create my own ideas and not just a design on a tee-shirt makes me very happy as I find myself newly filled with passion, especially with something that I haven’t done before is very motivating. I feel as though I have been practicing and working on skills that I already have learned or skills I have a lot of experience in, so learning to sew and make clothes is an excellent change of pace for me as it’s an entirely foreign world for me. Exploring new skills is scary for me as I tend to get comfortable with the things I have experience in, so this project really pushes me out of my comfort zone and forces me to practice and get more skillful. I am greatly looking forward to the next week of work and what I have planned for the next 4-5 weeks. I plan to construct pants and learn more advanced techniques with the sewing machine, work with new materials, and learn about different types of fabrics and what they are best suited for, which will significantly help my progress in curating a collection of clothes for the end of senior project.