GCSE Textiles, anyone?

If you've just started GCSE Textiles or are in your second year of it, we have a few tips for you from our own personal experiences:

•  Don't leave everything at the last minute! - Doing everything at the last minute for any subject is a bad habit to get into, so don't do that for Textiles either! In fact, any D&T subject because it takes quite a lot of time to do. Trust us, we've been up until 2am doing our textiles coursework and we still have the eyebags to show it.
• Don't leave empty spaces! Make sure your moodboards are fit to burst with images, make sure your evaluation pages are full with images and lots of writing (or what we say, bullshit, there's no right or wrong answer as long as you justify what you say when evaluating) and make sure your designs fill the whole page of A3. Don't be a wuss and make your drawings dainty and invisible, make sure the examiner can see it.
• Take pictures of everything! - Why? I hear you ask, because you'll need it to show the blood sweat and tears that went into creating your garment. Instead of using words to explain everything you've done, you could just stick in a picture, write a measly paragraph instead of an essay and bob's your uncle.
• Have enough time! - From what I remember, once we started making, everyone went into panic mode. Remember you have about 6-8 weeks to make your garment, make sure you ask your teacher at every stage what you should do next or else you'll spend your lessons unpicking your stitches and you don't want to be doing that!
• Don't have extremely tight stitching! - Ok this made us suffer quite a lot, the reason we say this is because if you do ever make a mistake, you won't be able to unpick all those extremely secure and tight stitches. Due to frustration, we actually cut our fabric by accident :-/
• Write write write! - Write an introduction and a conclusion for each page except the moodboard. It can even be just two sentences each! Also remember to evaluate everything, every design, every construction and decoration technique to the quality of your finished garment.
• Beware of the overlocker! - Back in the beginning of our textiles journey, we were very afraid of the overlocker, our tip to you is don't press the foot pedal so hard! It's as simple as that. Just overlock the edges of your garment in a controlled manner and then you'll end up becoming best friends with it, like we have. Seriously, without the overlocker our garments would've just disintegrated into thread. 

Last but not least HAVE FUN! If we didn't have fun, why do you think we're taking it for A-Level?