So many pleats

I'm in full Gold Handmaiden mode right now, and it's the pleating that is taking so much time. I'm not going to go into the details on what I'm doing,until I'm finished, but here is the first panel done.

The stressing thing is that it's taken me the whole week to get this piece done, and this is just a small part of the whole gown. It's definitely been a learning curve, you can see that the pleats do differ in evenness, size and straightness over the piece. This is going to be a back piece so it's not going to be very visible, I'm going to practice on the other back piece before I start with the visible parts.