A good first garment project for sewing practice should offer enough tasks to learn from but not so many that every single step feels like a problem. It is easy to be seduced by the prospect of sewing a fitted dress, a lined jacket or trousers, or a garment with a zipper. However, those projects require several skills simultaneously. A better first project focuses on fabric grain alignment, seam allowance, stitch tension and control, pressing, and simple seam finishing, with little or no complex shaped pieces and fewer details than other options.
You want a project with a very small number of pieces, mostly of which involve stitching straight seams or gently curved seams. An elastic-waist skirt, a loose top, an apron, or a simple pull-on garment are examples of much simpler and less complicated projects compared to pieces requiring darts, collars, cuffs, linings, or a lot of fitting points. Simplicity does not equate to less useful. A simple project offers you the opportunity to learn and practice the measuring, cutting, pinning, sewing, and pressing steps one by one.
You can choose a suitable sewing project and still make a mistake with a bad fabric choice. Very slippery or very thick fabrics are problematic for a beginner sewist; one can move too much under the machine foot, and the other results in thick seams that are challenging to press flat. With an easy-to-work with woven cotton fabric you can mark it accurately with chalk, you can easily pin it to your pattern pieces, and you can feed it through the machine with precision. Always inspect your fabric for grain on the table before you lay out the pattern pieces. A fabric that is twisted or stretched out of grain before you cut it can be a headache later when the finished garment is hanging crooked even though the sewing itself is well done.
Before you commit to a project, examine the sewing instructions and see what the unfamiliar processes are. If there is a zipper, buttonholes, a lining, a curved facing, or multiple darts, that is probably best left to a future project after you have had a chance to work on a few smaller projects. If the process instructions have mainly simple side seam construction, raw edge pressing, hemming, or an elastic casing, the project is a more suitable candidate for a beginner. You are not trying to avoid challenge completely. You are trying to choose one or two new skills at a time instead of ten.
Another effective practice when selecting your first sewing project is to stitch one test seam before cutting all the garment pattern pieces. Cut a scrap of the exact same type of fabric, thread your machine, insert the correct needle, and sew a few inches in a straight line along a scrap piece. Check for seam gathering, for correct threading tension on the stitches, and that the seam can be pressed flat in one direction on your ironing surface. This small test can save you from a lot of wasted time down the road on a project that is showing signs of potential problems.
Many novice sewers also increase the challenge of a garment project by skimping on the preparations. They cut the pattern pieces before checking the cutting lines and markings, remove the paper pattern before transferring the markings to the fabric, and overlook seam allowances on one or more of the edges. Have the paper pattern pieces ready as long as you can until you have traced and cut all the pieces. Hold fabric pieces in position with pins or clips as you align them before sewing and always double check that the notches are matching, the right sides are together, and the raw edges of the seam allowance are aligned before you stitch. You may think you are slowing things down, but you can save yourself much heartache when your seam ripping is no longer a one or two-minute ordeal.
You are not looking for perfection, but rather for something you can comprehend at the completion of the project. You may discover a slightly uneven hem, a slightly off-straight seam, or a tight elastic casing that needs to be a bit larger. That is perfectly okay. A well-completed garment project provides you with new skills and insights that help you improve next time, whether that means a better awareness of how your fabric reacts to certain sewing methods, how your thread tension and stitch length look, and where you should pay extra attention to your seam allowance.