Shout out to the perfect cropping of Pascha’s shirt throughout this episode.

Can I borrow some of your fleece?

I am sorry this is so late, between the emotional damage inflicted upon me by the Matthew Wong exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum (the most well curated works of art I’ve ever seen) and the fact the only time I saw any fruit or vegetables was when I ate brandy-soaked raisin pancakes at 10am; the recovery from my Amsterdam trip has been slow.

It’s the annual Sports Day Trauma Week, what’s your damage? Mine is personally waking up in the middle of the night with the memory of having been put on a team in junior school that we, VOLUNTARILY, called “The Golden Beavers” which is just phenomenal retrospective cringe. We had a theme song and everything:

I don’t know but I’ve been told
The Beaver Team is made of gold
Our feats of might were foretold
A sight for sore eyes to behold
[and then I just blackout but there were definitely 2 verses]

add a line about snatching the crown or turning looks and BAM! You’ve got a verse for a songwriting challenge on Drag Race. Also, Canada’s Drag Race might owe us royalties?

It was Ariadne Reviews… _inspired.

Sports Week does at least exaggerate my favourite reality TV phenomenon: Being Forced To Exercise During Personal VTs as everyone competes to have the most unique hobby. Unfortunately for Suzy’s weight training, Luke’s perfect recreation of Lady Gaga’s Telephone choreography while 4 tequilas down and Janet’s Heavy Duty Adult Hula Hoop

Pascha has them beaten with Competitive Fencing

between that and her penchant for recreating historically accurate Georgian ball gown ~for funsies~ I fear we may have to eat her come the revolution.

Fleecy Does It

Kicking off this week’s Sports Week was the Pattern Challenge in which the sewers had to make a Half Zip Fleece. The process of which involves it looking a little bit like you got halfway through building your Ikea Pteranodon and realised you’d screwed the beak to the arm

and with the pattern being made up of various different panels, the sewers were encouraged to play with colours because we cannot have another series where every pattern challenge is a melange of dark blues to hide your filthy, filthy sewing sins. Marcus took this the most literally, waiting for everyone else to choose their fabrics before beginning his own Charity Fabric Fun Run for the Marcus’s Fleece Association: No Polyester Left Behind

his idea being to make a patchwork trauma fleece that captured the universal frustration with coverstitching that engulfed the room. And if having endured his own One Small Favour quest hadn’t got him sweating enough

he then had to tell Esme he was planning to nix the all important zip pocket because he spent so much time getting the medicine for the blacksmith to make the steel bars to turn the pigeon cages into chicken coops for the racist monster cult to free the apprentice of the witch so that she can be a witness to exonerate an innocent man (my therapist doesn’t think this is valid trauma but it’s why I have trust issues)

and truly nothing is going to make a man sweat more than a short woman with the second most threatening bob in existence

the most threatening obviously being Azealia Banks’s Breakfast Club Music For Gays Moment

but after she (Esme, not Azealia Banks) and Patrick all but told him they would eliminate him on the spot if he dared make life easier for himself as Janet lay in the corner fighting for her life, he relented

and it was very much worth it as his Technicolour Dream Fleece came out on top

much to his bird-like surprise

I apologise for thinking Marcus was a little bit boring last week – truly this episode was his as he went from winning the first round to then just ricocheting from one PornHub Category to the next

I have never in my life screamed “NO!” more loudly.

While Marcus went with a biblically accurate fleece, Pascha found herself getting thoroughly Brogan’d for being boring and making a just about solitarily green fleece because of her spiritual connection to the colour

and I would say that’s the most disappointed Patrick looked this episode but then came the Systematic Dismantling of Janet’s Fleece

to be fair it was a little bit of a disaster with the pocket zip being both upside down and very squonk

and the shoulder spewing so many threads it looked like it had been in altercation with Comfort’s Spiderman Fleece

this wasn’t the biggest issue with the shoulders though as she’d built in her own aerodynamic speed flaps which, because I’m a millennial, will always be known as Aeroplane Phalanges to me

and we might as well lock her up in a temple of snakes as Janet proved to be her own personal slightly generous Cassandra

yeah, there was no way she was going to beat Comfort’s The Spiderman We Have At Home

or Ailsa’s Irn Bru sponsored fleeces given Patrick’s questioning of whether Janet had actually read the instructions

Ailsa probably could’ve done with a few Irn Bru considering she continues to suffer from time management issues with her fleece not being finished. Alex had the opposite problem, having enough time at the end to be possessed with the urge to stick a sun where the sun don’t ordinarily shine. She didn’t even seem to know where this sudden heliocentric possession came from as she held it aloft like a child in a horror movie showing their parents the prognosticated murder scene they’d just drawn

it’s not really a surprise that she powered through making a fleece so quickly considering she’s from the Peak District where we shed fleeces like reptiles shed skin

and most of her sewing was very good, she just got dinged for the sewing of the time-consuming butt sun being a little bit puckery

if this prevents everyone from embellishing their garments with nonsense in the future I’m going to be *so* mad. She did still at least came fourth, narrowly missing out on a podium position to Luke reclaiming sports for the trans community

absolutely based power move, the result being an incredibly cute trans fleece that I need to own IMMEDIATELY

I *might* have given them second place purely for having more of a point of view than Georgie’s silver medalling fleece which was very well sewn (objectively a more important consideration) but looked more ordinary and retaily

she did also have an upside down zip, but that’s only because the Isle of Wight is the Australia of the United Kingdom

she’s still acclimatising and can occasionally be found sleeping upside-down in the haberdashery like a bat.

This Pattern Challenge was a vast improvement on last week’s with everyone’s fleeces being entirely wearable if perhaps lacking the occasional hem or gaining superfluous shoulder phalanges. It also helped there were no buttonholes to make and everyone had finally managed to assert dominance over their machines, if mostly by growling at them

we’ll move on to Lauren’s Juicy Couture Fleece swiftly before this becomes an Omegaverse Sewing Bee fanfic in which the overlocker is clearly the alpha

she landed perfectly in the middle of the pack with it, nudging Suzy’s pink fleece into the bottom half

you can practically hear Esme gearing up to tell her to make something that isn’t pink – a brave critique if she’s seen Suzy’s trapezius (clarifying it’s a muscle for those that have forgotten everything their highschool biology teacher tried in vain to teach them)

she will suplex Esme into yesterday.

This leaves us with Sweet Baby Angel Don™ who was trapped in his very own horror movie, his weapon of choice being an iron

the fact he’d left a decent amount of his pocket on his iron was the least of his problems as he’d ended up with a misaligned collar and doing a zigzag stitch instead of the coverstitch

AT LEAST THERE WAS A HEM

When are Esme and Patrick going to guest judge a Drag Race design challenge? I need to see Esme getting in an argument with a drag queen about the size of their bow IMMEDIATELY.

An Official Fleece Ranking:
1. Marcus’s Technicolour Trauma Fleece
2. Georgie’s This Way Up Fleece
3. You Can’t Spell Transport without Trans and Sport
4. The Only Sun The Peak District Will See
5. Lady Greensleeves
6. Lauren’s Juicy Couture
7. On Tuesday Evenings We Wear Pink
8. Don’s Personal Horror Fleece
9. Ailsa: Sponsored By Irn Bru
10. The Spiderman We Have At Home
11. Janet’s Instructionless Fleece

Holy Crickets, You’re Some Other Piece of Wizarding Intellectual Property

This weeks’ Transformation Challenge was taking inspiration from cricket, a sport nobody truly understands how to play! Least of all Lauren who seems to think it might involve some sort of mortal combat element

I am personally of the belief that most sports would be improved if we added a little bit of Roman Gladiatorial flare. If a speedo clad swimmer can find a way to smuggle a fascina into the pool, who am I to disqualify them?

The sewers were only permitted to use whatever pieces of cricket equipment they could identify with access to the haberdashery being made illegal (BOO!)

this was as a nod to the first year students of Central Saint Martin’s who have to apparently make an avant garde creation using only white fabric which seems to mostly result in outfits that look like the snowflake decorations your toddler makes at preschool that you have to begrudgingly hang on your carefully curated aesthetic tree

I promise I’m not having kids – I’m just getting two parakeets called Sebastian and Cordelia. We’re going to be very happy growing old and bitter together.

Luke was very much in their happy place as they start every morning with a hearty bowl of Thierry Muglerios

and being led by their draggy senses, immediately began creating my new favourite British cryptid: The Soho Bog Witch

and if you’re wondering where she sits on the fashion history spectrum, it’s right in the middle of the Kate Moss / Joan of Arc Venn Diagram

which I think can be certified as genuine fact because that’s also exactly where Florence Welch sits and if anyone can be described as the Soho Bog Witch, it’s her

and given that Luke was talking a big game about avant garde and protective cup shoulder pads, I wish we had ended up with something more Florence and the Machine than we did Florence Should’ve Used a Gentler Cycle On The Washing Machine

although the back is more interesting than the front given it shows off their use of the piping as strapping better

Luke only narrowly missed out on a podium position again with Suzy knocking them down to fourth as she took third by risking it all on one of her 7 potential wedding dress ideas (Suzy: Never Knowingly Underprepared!)

I will now be offering a reward to whoever can find me Suzy’s Secret Wedding Dress Pinterest Board because I need to know what the other 6 designs look like if this distressed Dance of the Cygnets look is anything to go by

my absolute favourite thing about this is if you dye it black you’ve got the dream prom dress for every teenage girl in 2005 who overly identified with the song Helena by My Chemical Romance

add that music video to the list of things that Trans’d me in the Ariadne Lore Book. Gerard Way knew what they were doing.

While Suzy’s may have been a wedding dress, it was Alex’s outfit that ended up looking the most like the civil war ghost bride in the room

I legitimately love this and can fully see someone like Hunter Schafer wearing this given she has a penchant for dressing up like vengeful ghosts looking for their lost artefacts

I apologise to Hunter, but that’s been living in my head since the Golden Globes in January and I had to exorcise it somehow.

Alex’s wasn’t the only ghost in the room, there was a lot of white so everyone’s looked like ghosts haunting very different parties, but Ailsa’s did look alarmingly like something James Wan would put in one of his uncountable Conjuring sequels, prequels, NyQuils and spinoffs set in an abandoned 1940s mental hospital

what did help Ailsa this time is that she could get away with having a significant part of the outfit looking like she’d haphazardly safety pinned fusilli lunghi to the dress and it’d be called fashion this time

where was that leniency LAST WEEK

it was clearly an AVANT GARDE tactical lesbian potato sack.

Ailsa being halfway through making a Melanzana alla Parmigiana on her mannequin would not end up being the weirdest hip adornments as Georgie kind of just hung a pair of the cricket pads there which somehow distracted everyone from the fact she’d made boob gills

I cannot work this outfit out, my notes just say “Georgie – Huh?” She still only came third last, mostly because the only person with a more baffling outfit than her was Comfort who followed in Neil’s footsteps and just made a slightly longer sleeveless cricket shirt

10 series in and still Esme has to tell people that chopping the sleeves off a top is not a transformation <3

However she still wasn’t last on account of Marcus’s dedication to singlehandedly creating a series of The Great British Millinery Off with his second Transformative piece of headgear

absolutely nothing in life thrills me more than one of the world’s most ordinary looking men accidentally stumbling into kink at every turn

I will however defend the woolen gimp rabbit (one of Margery Williams’s less successful children’s books) as probably being the most avant garde because if you put a gun to my head and told me to decide whether the fish hat that looks like it was cobbled together within 90 minutes by a panicked ameture sewer having to make a statement about climate change out of discarded dance costumes or the kinky mid-wicket were a Vivienne Westwood creation

I’d pick the cricketing fetishist every time. AND I THINK VIVIENNE WESTWOOD’S GHOST WOULD TOO.

The main issue was the fact Marcus’s bunnyclava wasn’t a full outfit, even if it would technically be a bottom wearing a top

it also depends where you’re going and if you’re wearing a balaclava with rabbit ears for extra grip, you really don’t need much more of an outfit. It was also far from the only outfit that came with a severe case of nudity as Don made a tits out for the boys scarecrow

which is only marginally more covered up than the knitted cummerbund he started with

he still came a very respectable 6th place for it.

There were a few cases of sewers just making a dress – Janet’s was the most egregious because it just looked like a Shein dress that would not survive even the gentlest wash cycle

while I love the anonymity of the Transformation Challenge judging giving rise to supremely chaotic leaderboards, it does mean we don’t get Janet doing a 5 slide PowerPoint presentation trying to justify which part of this baseline cottagecore outfit is avant garde. I’m waiting, Janet. My inbox is open. She wasn’t the only one though, because Lauren’s was also just a dress with a bow

and while a big bow may have been considered avant garden 5 years ago, this is 2024 where you’re not doing avant garde unless you’re having to be carried up the stairs by 4 men

next year the sewers will be given 2 tonnes of recycled nursery school sand to make beach costumes out of. Don’t ask why it had to be recycled.

Lastly we have Pascha who defaulted to the failsafe Project Runway method of avant garde: an exaggerated collar

I’m not entirely sure the final result was so much Elizabethan aristocracy so much as it was Queen Elizabeth’s cone of shame

hey, they had to stop her picking at her smallpox somehow.

An Official Cricket Whites Transformation Challenge:
1. Alex’s Civil War Ghost Bride
2. Ailsa’s Insane Asylum Pasta Chef
3. WHAT’S THE WORST THAT I CAN SAY? THINGS ARE BETTER IF I STAY
4. The So-so Bog Witch
5. Queen Elizabeth’s Cone of Shame
6. TITS OUT FOR THE CROWS!
7. Lauren’s Perfectly Adequate Bow
8. Janet x Shein
9. Georgie – HUH?
10. Comfort’s Slightly Longer Cricket Shirt
11. JUSTICE FOR THE KINK BUNNY

Pick Your Sportsperson

Sadly Sports Week was not culminating in an Olympic Year tie-in for the sewers to design their own Olympic Mascots. I only just found out this year’s mascot are the Olympic Phryges which is also an excellent name for a pornstar

they’re based on the Phrygian hats, a nod to famous figures of the formation of the French Republic like Papa Smurf

nothing but respect for my Président de la République française.

Instead the tie-in was for the sewers to choose any sport they wanted and create their country’s team kit. Obviously there was a lot of Team GB because the British are moths to a patriotic flame. Pascha was however caught between a rock and hard place, unable to continue her spiritual connection to green because the world’s least imaginative flag had gone out of use in 2011

and her mum’s sister’s friend’s secretary’s dogwalker is maybe possibly, unconfirmed at this time on the Team GB javelin team

she had probably done the most legwork for her Team GB outfit, having gone to the lengths of getting a fabric printed specifically for the challenge instead of showing up with three leftover buttons from her Coronation Weekend street party suit and hoping for the best (WE WILL TALK ABOUT YOU, DON)

and in the end, it was a very good, bespoke looking outfit if possibly, to quote MST3K, heavy on the batch

you could take someone eye out with it and I’m only talking a little bit about the Javelin.

In all there were 3 other Team GB outfits, some of which could’ve just changed to one of the other 30 Red, White and Blue flag countries and been fine. Marcus had kind of set his in stone though for his rock climbing uniform which he had had chosen purely because it let him make a chalk bag in the disappointing lack of hats seen across Olympic sports

but it could still either be Team British Guiana or a very colourblind uniform for Bulgaria. WHO READS BOTTOM TO TOP, MARCUS?

Alex had a bit of a colour spectrum issue, having gone for a Team GB marathon kit inspired by her Scottish father

and if you’re wondering “Why didn’t she just make it a Scottish kit for the Commonwealth Games?”… she did, she just didn’t want to start Scottish Independence discourse on the Sewing Bee and I can respect that

Although given the tones she used, I think we entered Accidental Estonian territory

there’s worse places to land with largely blue and white themed nationalism…

Our last Team GB outfit came from Don, who showed up with a couple of buttons, some pocket lint and a dream

usually if someone came on to the show having dressed up as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and talked about their experience as a costume maker for their local Am-dram theatre company, we would’ve ended up with a Team GB golfing costume like this

Don however was on a one man revolution against the concept of sports (that’s the Paris 2024 spirit!)

and so he was basically just going to make a nice skirt and a polo shirt. Or at least they would be nice in theory, the end result did look a bit like someone had chewed on an airline steward because the collar had been sewn on in a blind panic and he’d forgone cuffs entirely which I’m sure probably violates the golfing club dress code

but he wasn’t the only one with a collar mishap, as Comfort’s horseshoe collar hadn’t ended up being as lucky as she’d hoped it would

the lack of interfacing is the reason it looks a bit like partially kneaded bread and unfortunately for her, the rest of her outfit was relatively simple

she could’ve done more to lean into the Ugandan theme rather than just a couple of iron-on transfers – Marcus had at least gone to the lengths of making a homemade misspelling of a 2 letter abbreviation. She wasn’t the only one to rely on a transfer as Ailsa was putting A LOT of faith in this Canadian badge

unfortunately her main player had a bit of stage-fright and was hiding behind the theatre curtain of her skort

all of this could’ve been avoided if she’d just chosen to put the badge on the polo shirt, of if her model had just hopped down the runway in this exact pose the whole time

there were still a lot of design elements to make up for the shyness of the Canadian delegation – she’d pleated the skort herself and the collar looked like it had been applied with a degree of calmness. I did think more people would opt for sports on the golf end of the activity spectrum given it would limit how much stretch fabric they’d have to work with. However, Janet was never going to be able to resist the siren song of rhythmic gymnastics much like she cannot resist Hallmark’s Live Laugh Love aisle

her country of choice being Ukraine, for no personal reasons, she just knows that red, white and blue is a HORRIBLE COLOUR COMBINATION. Given the terrible things that stretch fabric, and glittery stretch fabric in particular, have done to sewers in the past, Janet’s little gymnastics costume was good!

not that I’m surprised because I think Janet practically lives in shiny stretch fabrics and outfits that could potentially pass as at least being the coach for a gymnastics team

I am only disappointed that she somehow managed to resist the urge to go for a synchronised swimming outfit – she and Luke were our best hopes for touching the divine of Russia swimming around with the visage of Annabelle the haunted doll bedazzled across their chests in London 2012 while looking like Homer Simpson’s makeup gun had done a number on them

instead Luke had opted to mummify their model in the colours of the Spanish flag

Luke’s final outfit did end up looking like one of the more Olympic-y ones in the room with it being a good mix of Gymshark basics and a highly impractical Fashion Nova bathing suit that comes with explicit instructions to not get wet

there were a few fit issues caused by the fact Luke got catfished by some fake powermesh

This is why you don’t trust someone that only has a torso pic!

Georgie had managed to avoid the nicheness of power mesh scammers who prey upon reality TV contestants with short notices, resulting in a perfect track and field costume for Trinidad and Tobago that they’d be hard to beat this summer

with just a little bit of tweaking, it could very easily be a sponsored by Nike situation.

Suzy was continuing to ask everyone if they even lifted with her take on a Kenyan weightlifting unitard, which in true Chaos Suzy fashion she had been practicing like she was going to the Olympics herself

some of us do breathing exercises when we’re scared, others bury their heads in the sand and one of us apparently becomes a self-induced sweatshop that no amount of spandex can satisfy. But I’m sure Team Kenya could borrow them for 2024

I guess Kenya doesn’t even lift, bro.

The main issue for Suzy was trying to perfectly line up all 16 of the colour bands on her unitard. She hadn’t quite got it perfectly on but it was mere millimetres out so I’ll give it to her

and from the front it looked really bold and clean

I can think of worse things to have 8 of in your closet.

Lastly we have Lauren who was the only person outdoing Janet in the glitter stakes, a fact Janet was trying not to take personally

oh it’s ON LIKE DONKEY KONG! It’s glittery handbags at Holiday Week next week (by which I mean tomorrow, I’M SORRY)

but for now, Lauren was repping Jamaica at the 2024 Sunny Mill Gymnastics Conference and her model was definitely feeling herself in this leotard

she looks phenomenal and I would forgive her if she started doing her weekly Big Shop wearing it. The only thing preventing Lauren from taking the gold was the loose elastic in the leg which Esme wasted no time in pulling like the model was a drawstring doll

There’s a snake in my toe shoe!

An Unofficial Olympic Team Kit Ranking:
1. Georgie’s Trinidad and Trackbago
2. Pascha’s 7 Degrees of Tom Daly Separation
3. Lauren’s Jamaican Sparkle Bum: A My Little Pony OC
4. Luke’s Non-stretch Spanish Mummy
5. Dulling Janet’s Sparkle: A Floor Routine
6. Alex’s Accidental Estonia
7. The 8 Unitards of Weightlifting Suzy
8. Team… BG?
9. Putting the Nada in Canada
10. Comfort’s Unlucky Horseshoe Collar
11. Two Buttons Is All Team GB Deserves, VIVA LA REVOLUTION!

Another week, another absolutely all over the place leaderboard with Georgie taking gold after Suzy and Luke had led all episode

it’s a party at the daytime al fresco fish restaurant and rave!

I have made it abundantly clear that I would die for Don – he’s perfect and while I would indeed protect him from the world with the dedication of an emperor penguin mother travelling 50 miles for a gullet of fish, I’m not nearly as ok with Comfort taking the hit this week as she was

I’ll never forgive Esme, Patrick or the very concept of rugby for this.

And so, 10 sewers move on to Holiday week!