yay I'm glad to see other people aside from me posting in this thread.
imported_sha- that bag is gorgeous! I love how you have the border at the bottom, and using choorees as handles was so creative. I wouldn't have known you layered fabrics, the purple fabric has a textured look, it looks like it's part of the fabric's design which gives it some depth and makes it more interesting. Those fabrics look slippery, must have been tricky to sew, and it looks so neat! Nice job!
As for patterns, do you get Vogue/McCall/Simplicity/Butterick patterns there? They have modern designs, but yeah it's never an exact fit. And yeah it's a lot of work, making the pattern is the hard part for me, sewing it is easy because most of the main work is done by then and it's just connecting the pieces. That's good that you're taking a class though.
kamuzrana- after you gather it do you steam it? That's supposed to shrink some of the gathers. In class we were taught you should use a sleeve mold thing (forget what it's called), it's a round padded thing, you put the gathered sleeve around it and steam the gathers, you could just do it at home without it though. Some fabrics are easier to set in, I'm guessing the abaya was a slippery polyester or rayon, what I do for slipperies is gather it (I sew 2 rows to gather in case one breaks) then I pin it in place and loosely sew it by hand to make it stay in place when I remove the pins to machine sew it. But yeah even mine came out bumpy, I didn't have that steam mold thing though.