Glad we could settle the debate over that pluralisation. Now do Mongoose.

Grab snacks and hold on to your buttonholes, it’s a bumpy ride!

As we descend ever further into the depths of The Worst Timeline, we have once again gathered the most wholesome people in the United Kingdom (and Neil) into a refurbished textile mill in the futile hopes of rebooting the system. Here are the 12 guinea-pigs in this 12 Monkeys experiment

and because I have developed only a single method of relating to people, here they are as their Animal Crossing personas

there has been a change to the face of the show as Sewing Bee proves to be to British Funny People as 2:22 A Ghost Story is to Any British Woman Over 35 (it’s like our jury duty) and Kiell Smith-Bynoe takes the reins of this shetland pony at a village fete of a show

and despite his first helming of the main show (fake fans don’t know he already did the Christmas specials) being perfectly inoffensive, we of course had newspapers churning out rage-bait headlines. Meanwhile, Pink News was asking the hard questions

IGNORE THAT THE LINK HAS BEEN CLICKED ON. (we don’t know if he has a partner. Saved you a click.)

Get In A-line

As it’s the 10th series of the Sewing Bee, we’re kicking off with an anniversary celebration and revisiting the very first series. Which is very cute but does also give me pause for concern over the longevity of the show given MasterChef waited until it was 20 series deep before getting soppy eyed and weirdly romantic

AND THEN THEY KISSED.

Given that Sewing Bee has burnt their way through nearly 90 non-copyright sewing patterns, I can see why they wanted to ouroboros their way back to an A-line Skirt

the only specifications being that it had to be made out of denim, include top stitching and at least have a vague attempt at 8 buttons and buttonholes. There was a machine to help with the buttonholing. Well, in theory it was to help, in practice it was so antagonistic I can only assume its gears were recycled from a serial killing cotton gin from the mid 19th century

and you know what they say: When the going gets tough, the tough… make a cape instead

the best part of the fact Lauren had essentially made a piece of costuming for Strictly’s most ill-advised Paso Doble since Will Mellor got lost in the world’s tiniest cape

she still landed on the podium in this Olympics of Futility

icon behaviour. Someone break out the –

oh, she’s ahead of me.

The only people beating Lauren were Pascha and Alex. Pascha had managed to come out on top because she heard everyone else losing a fights against a buttonholer and just… didn’t bother with them

I’m going to assume we’re in for a series of garments being sealed with velcro, zips and ancient elven riddles

still easier to open than a hook and eye bra.
Pascha’s denim skirt was at least also memorable for its vibrant sunshine yellow colour

Alex proved to be the Yin to Pascha’s Yang as she put forward a black denim skirt with no buttons but (maybe) some buttonholes

it might take me a couple of episodes to get on board with Alex purely because following Interior Design Masters I am still suffering PFSD (Post-Francesca Stress Disorder)

I’m just saying, I wouldn’t be entirely unsurprised if Alex pitched up to episode 3 looking like one of those weird clown ornaments that only great aunts collect

Michelle Ogundehin unabashedly keeping her around for the sole purpose of an anthropological research paper was a highlight of the series.

The only other two sewers who went for anything vibrant were Suzy and Janet who both opted for pink. This wasn’t a surprise considering Suzy wasted no time in making it her entire personality

and Janet method dressing for Barbenheimer Weekend (I assume)

the top-stitching wasn’t the only contrast Janet was embracing as she went for a contrast panelling as well

she probably should’ve landed in the Top 3 but her schmoozing of the judges needs a little bit of work

although saying that, Esme was practically passing tickbox notes to Don while the teacher wasn’t looking and he came second last

unfortunately he hasn’t metamorphosed into a social butterfly yet

when I say I will protect this man with my life, I mean it. I will take bullets for him. Hell, I’d even fight that wretched buttonholing menace if he needs me to (and he does)

it is quite spectacular just how incomplete everyone’s denim skirts were, but in a way it still makes the show feel like itself. As Bake Off and Pottery Throwdown move more and more towards professional standards, it’s fun to have one of these shows still feel like it’s a group of hobbyists making it up as they’re going along.

Suzy’s take on pink was a little more fraught as by the time 30 minutes had elapsed she just wanted the whole thing to be over so she refused to unpick some errant top stitching

and took more of a slash and grab approach to buttonholes

going full Ghostface on the skirt did still prove to be a more effective way of making the buttonholes than the machine – Ailsa’s looked like it had been made by a hungry rottweiler

someone needs to exorcize those machines, and while they’re there can they throw a crucifix at Terry?

many weird things happened during Lockdown: people threw birthdays for their dishwashers

some created entire weddings for their Lindt bunnies

at least one of us started a blog about reality TV to keep the voices at bay

but I think we can safely say that Neil building a puppet that looks like a troglodytic Donald Trump adapted for a life of no sun and very little access to food like one of those Mexican cave fish has us all beaten

I just want to know if Terry ever goes with Neil on the True Crime Bicycle Tours or if that would give away the fact the tours are actually autobiographies

Neil, we’re going to need to dig up the patio.

As Neil got distracted with performing the world’s worst ventriloquist act, he’d decided he was going to do all of his top stitching last so that he didn’t have to constantly swap thread

that’ll save him time and there’s definitely no way this could come back to bite him in the ass…

hey, he had 8 buttons and that’s 8 more than just about half the cast who had to stand there waiting for their critiques looking like they’d eaten the buttons they hadn’t put on the skirt

Comfort had managed to get a couple of buttons on but her top stitching was a little bit too wonky for Esme and Patrick

on the other hand, Georgie had really great top stitching but the whole skirt, much like a braid in the 90s, was being held together by prayer and a butterfly clip

she still managed to land outside of the bottom 3 because Esme wants an invite to that early bird special rave that Georgie DJs between the crockery cupboard and specials board

Judging by the prices of that John Dory, her equivalent of the drunk girls smashing their phones against glass of the DJ booth with “DRAKE” written in their notes app is some lady called Doris zimmerframing her way over and asking her to play the 15th Frank Sinatra song of the afternoon and where the ladies room is again. So… collective field trip to Georgie’s daytime rave?

Marcus had gone for a bold white denim skirt with black contrast stitching and still managed to land in the top half of the group despite only have 1 button and 1 and a half buttonholes

I know I’m a broken record but I really cannot get over the magnitude of the buttonhole situation – and I refuse to blame the sewers because it’s not like 1 or two of them had issues. THE WINNER OF THE CHALLENGE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE ANY! I want an 8 episode investigative crime podcast about it and I’ve got the perfect host in mind

I don’t know of a single First Boot who has had more of a meteoric impact on me than Neil.

Lastly we have Luke who was taking their inspiration from the only valid use of double denim

I would expect nothing less from this year’s resident drag artist

In the end, Luke’s skirt was a perfectly middle of the road option featuring some great top stitching but falling slightly short of, and you’re never guess this, the buttonholes

although at least the excess thread was a novel issue amongst everyone else.

An Official A-line Denim Skirt Ranking:
1. Pascha’s Pitfall Avoidance
2. Ecnadiova Llaftip S’ahcsap
3. Not All Heroes Wear Denim Skirts
4. What Does It Feel Like To Be An Afterthought Now, Janet?
5. Oops, I Forgot The Buttonholes Again
6. Marcus By Virtue Of Everyone Else’s Level of Failure
7. Brief First, Comfort Seventh
8. The Dog Ate My Buttonhole
9. Georgie’s Cape But It’s Not a Joke, It’s Just A Fact
10. Terry Made Me Do It
11. Donny Blue Eyes
12. The Ghostface Stitcher

Oh… Shirt

Once upon a time this used to just be called The Alteration Challenge – the very first iteration just being for the sewers to alter the neckline of a t-shirt

nowadays, they want something much more dramatic with the sewers being tasked with turning up to three t-shirts into an entirely new garment. Or, if you’re Neil you can sort of just human centipede them together to make a slightly longer shirt

why doesn’t the big shirt simply eat the smaller shirts?

Neil wasn’t the only one playing it a little bit too safe as Lauren had a cut but ultimately too simple cha cha skirt

and not far behind her was Pascha who I thought had at least upped the ante a little bit by channeling Julia Fox doing her average grocery run with a high waisted thong on full display

sadly, and I mean that genuinely, it was just a waist tie

I will give £50 to the first sewer to make Patrick and Esme critique a thong made out of their dad’s ties.

Complexity didn’t equal success though as despite Ailsa making both a collar and cuffs for her cardigan, she had forgotten to factor in the very important fact that Esme doesn’t like brown

I will die on a hill claiming that Ailsa’s little hobbit coat deserved to be higher than 8th

it’s cute! And it speaks to her design sensibilities because there is no force more gender unifying than the urge to cosplay as a hobbit

Tired: Sam and Frodo are gay.
Wired: Sam and Frodo don’t experience gender at all, in this essay I will…

Ailsa wasn’t the only one to have been done a little dirty in the rankings because I also thought Alex’s little Parisian naval officer deserved a higher placement than 5th

ESPECIALLY because she had a better utilisation of bows than Janet’s anaemic little offering

You know The Devil Wears Prada speech about the colour cerulean dripping down from Oscar de la Renta’s 2002 collection to the tragic clearance bin sweater? Replace Cerulean with Vaguely Naval French Patriotism, 2002 Oscar de la Renta with 2015 Jean Paul Gaultier and tragic clearance bin sweater with transformation challenge creation from a Sewing Bee contestants who probably self-describes as “quirky”.

As ever, the Transformation Challenge was a prime opportunity for a redemption arc with Suzy going from 12th to first through the medium of plaiting and sexy, sexy cut outs

nothing quite gets Esme going like something she can describe as looking like it can be worn to a club which is why Georgie got third place

it also helped that it looked at least more reliable at keeping your boobs safe than Don’s attempt at a bra top which only seemed to come into existence because he realised a mini skirt might be too simple

that top is keeping NOTHING wrangled but I did like the colour combination on the skirt, so at least he had that going for him.

Luke also went for the classic Transformation Challenge technique of showing hole

unfortunately not everyone can be pleased

it’s always the daddies.

The most novel creation came from Marcus who just made a little bucket hat – which is deceptively simple, or at least to me it is because I had to make a hat in one of my high school sewing classes and it looked like I had failed to correctly taxidermy a penguin’s head (sadly no pictures remain of the disaster, I scoured the mausoleum to self-cringe that is my Facebook)

the hat did at least mean there was something for Patrick to try on which is always my favourite part of any Transformation Challenge

ah yes, the two genders.

Lastly we have Comfort, or as she shall henceforth be known: The Girl Ninja Turtle

God, they really will just deploy The Smurfette Principle rather than admit that Donatello is trans like a normal person. IN THIS ESSAY I WILL…

Lady Raphael’s going to need all the martial arts training she can get from whichever sensei lives in the sewers of Leeds because Alex has identified her as a threat

and so she should with Comfort taking a comfortable 2nd place for her fashionably laddered back

it’s very ShredderCore.

An Official T-shirt Transformation Ranking:
1. Chaos Suzy Is Deployed
2. Heroes In a Half-shell TURTLE POWER!
3. Somehow Janet
4. Georgie’s GTA Civilian
5. Alex’s Tragic Clearance Bin Two-piece WUZZ ROBBED
6. All That Hole AND FOR WHAT?
7. The Shirt Can Also Be… A Hat
8. The Hobbit Jacket Being This Low Is Nothing But Queerphobia
9. Pascha’s Faux Thong
10. Don’s Unwranglable Boobs
11. Lauren’s Shoop Shoop Song Skirt
12. Neil’s Slightly Longer Shirt

Business As Casual

For their very first Made to Measure Challenge, the sewers were asked to create a casual day dress which at least seems an easier task than the top-stitched and 8 buttoned denim skirt on the grounds that they could get away with making something looks a bit like one of the Amish might use it to go base jumping

I am kind of obsessed with Georgie’s zero waste (and zero waist) tablecloth kaftan which we can expect to see a lot more of if the setting up of the underground tablecloth black market is anything to go by

She’d also hacked the system by deciding the crochet trim would serve as her buttonholes

she didn’t have the time to add the buttons in the end so really it’s just a crochet trim, but the thought was fun!

Georgie wasn’t the only one doing a bit of recycling, Suzy was making her dress out of a duvet which she’d found charity shopping with her mum because her mum just wanted to be in Suzy’s VT

and after yoyoing around in the previous challenge rankings, she was determined to weight the average in her favour by relentless practicing at home

and truly she may have achieved haberdashery ascension as with only 10 minutes to go she was ruffleless and experiencing a rapid onset Jean Grey headache

but she defied the constraints of time, space and the production vacuum of Sewing Bee and now Suzy is spiritually a part of us all, and her dress was really good

that print definitely makes for a better dress in 2024 than it did a duvet at a boutique hotel competing on Four In A Bed in 2012.

Marcus once again attempting The Running of the Buttonholes

and while buttonhole making has proved to be something of minefield this episode, Marcus does at least have a fair amount of experience making stressful garments for someone else given he risks his marriage every time he sews something for his wife

and this was another garment for his wife, taking the classic Project Runway challenge approach of just saying anything is a “day to evening dress”. I’m not quite sure what business to casual spectrum the resulting dress was bridging though

perhaps she has to be on the Oregon Trail at 9 and the first thanksgiving at 10? In my head Marcus’s outfit is the daughter of Georgie’s Amish batsuit. One of them dies of dysentery while passing the Rocky Mountains

this took a turn.

Marcus wasn’t the only trying to channel their past experiences into their dress, Don once made 7 bridesmaids dresses

and you know how people used to kill moles and hang their corpses on their fences to… I don’t know, send a threatening message to the moles?

Don was hanging 7 godets for 7 bridesmaid dresses on his dress to make sure nobody ever asks him to do that again

unfortunately he hasn’t graduated from the Vicki Gill School of Godeting and he didn’t quite get to finish his dress with the bedraggled non-hem bringing down the polish of the dress a little bit

timing issues aren’t a surprise on the first episode, what was surprising was Esme being a fan of a godet

I truly thought it would be one of those things she vehemently hated like small bows and the colour brown, apparently. Ailsa was not going to let Esme’s newfound hatred of the Dulux Rich Neutrals Spectrum get her down and was breaking out a denim in the colour Medieval Farmhand Beige

she very much subscribes to the Amorphous Blob School of Gender Nonconformity. Meanwhile, with Luke

inside of you are two gender absent wolves.

Brown isn’t going to be the only thing that Esme and Ailsa butt heads over as Ailsa rebels against bows

the only thing more lesbian than fastening her dress with a heavy duty tactical clip would’ve been using a carabiner. That tactical clip had hell of a lot of weight to pull as Ailsa had not finished her dress and was relying on it to hide the panicked gathering that looked like someone had got halfway through removing someone’s appendix in the back alleys of Victorian London before deciding to steal the kidneys and run instead

the only thing more botched in this challenge was that the buttonhole eating rottweiler had got ahold of the back of Neil’s dress

and thus Project Margot was more of a Project Mar-D’OH!

if you were wondering what else Neil got up to during Lockdown other than making his very own Goosebumps monster, he’d been binge watching the BBC’s vintage sitcom archive

there’s a not 0% chance there’s a Margo Leadbetter doll in his attic. I didn’t mean it like THAT but there’s no way for it to not sound like I meant it like THAT.

It was a shame that Neil’s dress didn’t work out for him because it was actually a really lovely design and from the front it was still perfectly good for a background character in another of Call The Midwife’s limitless amount of street party scenes

but he had made a silky rod for his back by choosing a material that slipperier than the slope of making your own ventriloquist dummy.

As for who had the best print of the episode, it’s a fight between Comfort’s bespoke Tanzanian batik fabric

and Luke’s Internalised Trauma

I think in the end, Luke takes it purely because I liked the final look of their Cold War Era Carmen Sandiego Stealing an M.C. Escher Painting coat dress

I love it when you can tell the model LOVES the dress. Patrick had issues with there being too many solid black trimmings, I don’t really agree with him, if anything there could maybe just be less of the belt?

Comfort’s dress was a good idea, going for a fun cocoon-shaped dress. The one downside being that if you tell me you’re wearing a cocoon dress I will only be able to think about Jasmine Masters’s cocoon dress that she made while high as a kite

and while we inch ever closer to someone putting one of those dog agility course tunnels on a mannequin during a Crufts themed Transformation Challenge, today was not that day

her pattern matching? Excellent and completely unhinged to do on your very first Made to Measure Challenge. Unfortunately the actual cocoon shape had been somewhat hampered by the feminine urge to reclaim pockets

I’ll take a set of lumpy hips over the frustration of having to carry a handbag everywhere. Handbags are a symptom of Capitalism, in this essay I will… (how many essays am I writing now?) And if bigger marsupial pockets are what you need, Alex has got you covered

are they potentially a little bit too low? For some people, maybe! But as a woman with the proportions of a silvery gibbon I appreciated the representation

all the better to reach the top shelf cereals with.

While most of the sewers landed on the right side of casual, Lauren was flying a little too close to the Frozen Cosplay Sun

is it one of Elsa’s more casual dresses? Sure, but it’s still a little bit Idina Menzel Unsuccessfully Tries To Method For Frozen 3: Revenge of the Slush.

Janet and Pascha were both locked in a Green Off. Pascha skirting a fine line between aspirational cottagecore and Instagrammable Oktoberfest with her chartreuse milkmaid dress the colour of which looked really good on her model

I really like the top of the dress but the skirt is just completely directionless and looks in desperate need of a decorative trim or some sort of pleating. It’s veering towards nightie territory.

Janet’s dress mostly just made us all glad that Luke was the only to break out of the painting kit as she just about directed Kiell to baby’s first Jacques-Louis David study at gunpoint

Hey, what’s blue and red all over? Janet bludgeoning this innuendo with a sledgehammer

it’s giving Bake Off contestant making direct eye contact with the camera while making the 75th joke about checking the firmness of their plums.

As for Janet’s dress, it was perfectly fine

it’s not a colour I particularly like but given the roller Barbie look lurking in her wardrobe, I have no doubt it’ll end up in there. Or at least on the floor of one of her impressionist nudes.

An Unofficial Day Dress Ranking:
1. Cold War Era Punky Super Spy
2. Chaos Suzy Goes Super Saiyan
3. The Amish Batsuit
4. The Pockets For Gibbons Charity Relief Fund
5. Are You There God? It’s Me, Godet.
6. Some Type of Cocoon Grows… Like a Cocoon… The Butterfly Is In The Cocoon
7. Overdressed For The Icecapades
8. Pascha’s Little Milkmaid
9. I Dinged Janet Heavily For Being Unsubtle
10. Little Miss Queen of the Boring Business Prairies
11. Neil’s Dress As Long As You Stand Against The Wall At All Times
12. Ailsa’s Tactical Lesbian Potato Sack

I would personally have given Garment of the Week to Luke, but I really can’t complain about Suzy taking the prize for duvet dress because it was a really good dress and it makes the spreadsheet look fun

as for the elimination, it came down to being between Neil and Ailsa. I did think Ailsa was doomed because Neil has Protective Weird Puppet Armour and Ailsa has… a fondness for brown. However, she gets to try again next week and we lose Neil

I am bereft. I had come around to him by the time he started fanboying over Margot Leadbetter. I wont miss Terry, but I will miss Neil doing an awful attempt at ventriloquism.

And so 9 sewers go on to Sports Week but who’s only getting the Participation Trophy?