ThatGirlFromGalifrey
AradiaWindbourne
The above poster is being unnecessarily mean, but you do have a lot more to learn. I am looking at this on my phone, will be back with gentler critical later. I think you should keep trying but you will need a lot more fabric and better lace to make this work.
it´s okay, I feel bad for the person above they must have had a really bad day or something. I wish them well
Okay. Having had a chance to look at the picture on a full size screen, here are my thoughts:
1) You absolutely must pre-wash, pre-shrink and iron your fabric before you cut anything out. I hate ironing, but I do iron fabric before cutting and I iron the pieces as I work (to press/finish seams and shape the garment). If you don't iron the fabric before you cut, and it isn't absolutely flat, your seams will pucker because you will be cutting slightly off true grain, which will also mean more puckering as the garment shrinks/stretches with wear over time. If you take the garment apart and iron each piece you'll be able to see small discrepancies that made your seams more awkward.
2) It looks like you used/modified/drafted a sundress pattern. JSKs look a bit like sundresses but this is very deceptive because sundresses use a lot less fabric. Also that band of elastic at the top of the bodice is a sundress touch. Lolita dresses do often have some elastic at the top of the bodice, but when they do, there are also rows of elastic at the waist and sometimes also over the bust to pull the fabric in to fit your shape rather than letting it hang loosely around the torso like some sundresses do. Pinup dresses also have a similar top with two straps, but they're very constructed so that they cling to the body, with darts and stiff interlining and boning.
3) A lolita skirt (or the skirt part of a jsk/op) needs a LOT of fabric because it goes over a big petticoat and a pair of bloomers. The skirt is usually made from a big rectangle or pair of rectangles that when sewn together are 2.5 or even 3 times your waist size in width. Lolita skirts are usually not circle skirts (too narrow at the waist) or gored skirts, and while there are exceptions to these rules, until you're very familiar with the shape of lolita, stick to the cylinder skirt style. (The circle style is more pinup than lolita.) Your skirt should be somewhere between just above the knee to a few inches below it--on most people this is 20-24 inches (50-60 cm) long. If your waist is 28 inches, your skirt needs to be 70-84 inches at the hem. At the waist, you'll gather the skirt down to fit your waist (or if you plan to use elastic at the waist and in the top to control fullness, gather it down to 1-2 inches more than your bust since you will have to pull it down over your head. There are a lot of patterns that can be modified to make lolita dresses, but nearly all of them will make better lolita dresses if you just use the rectangle skirt--it's how 90% of Angelic Pretty jumperskirts work.
4) Lastly, the quality of your lace and trims is really important. Lace quality and lace price have little to do with each other. There are many inexpensive cluny-style laces made of thick cotton thread that look a bit like tatting or crochet that are much better for lolita than a more expensive, more delicate flat synthetic lace with little texture. (Ironically, I have often seen better lace on shirts at Wal-Mart than in department stores because Wal-Mart often uses this thick cotton lace.) The really high-end lolita dresses tend to use embroidered net laces that you'd normally find in the bridal section (but with NO SEQUINS) but for a simple day-time jumper skirt the cluny-style country lace is just fine. For similar reasons I would use grosgrain ribbon rather than satin ribbon. Unless you are using extremely high-quality and expensive materials, and have been doing lolita long enough to have a really good feel for the aesthetic, avoid anything shiny.
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