Sadly Lauren didn’t make it to Design A Man Week.

What frays faster: Brocade, or Suzy’s grasp of reality over the course of this week?

Nehru To Hide

India Week was not starting kindly as instead of dipping their toes in with something relatively simple, they were being waterboarded with the Nehru Jacket

clearly nothing was learned from the The Denim Skirt Disaster of Episode 1 with this being another element laden challenge with welt pockets, the unique stand collar and 5 buttons if you can manage to tame the automatic buttonhole machine which after yet another series of disasters, I believe prowl the sewing room like a group of velociraptors. Alex proved to be the Chris Pratt of the Sewing Room (I mean this as a compliment, I promise)

as her Nehru Jacket came out with not a slip up in sight

she’d chosen the perfect linen-y fabric which you knew when Georgie abandoned ship and hoped there was enough room for two people on this linen-y door (in this metaphor Esme Young is a tiny but powerful iceberg)

but because she’d put the British in Great British Sewing Bee by choosing to queue for her fabric instead of running across the room and grabbing the same fabric in a different colour, her’s did look a bit like the sweaty crib notes version of Alex’s

it was a challenge where the more boring your fabric, the better the final result. Unfortunately quite a few of the sewers were glamoured by the fact guest judge Priya Khanchandani had shown up looking like she was going to be strung from the ceiling for Disco Week

and immediately flocked towards the shiniest, blingiest and most wrong fabrics they could possibly get their hands on. The biggest offender of this was probably Lauren who grabbed a flimsy silk fabric that was like trying to tailor something out of butter

she didn’t feel like grovelling around for any spare cotton though and forged ever onwards to the inevitably wrong destination of Actually Quite Nice Pyjamas™

technically, I guess pyjamas are still in keeping with the Indian theme of the week

not helping? Sorry.

Pascha and Suzy had both gone for brocades, an inevitability with Suzy who has to battle with an innate desire to make wedding attire at every conceivable moment like a formalwear Gollum

and thus began Chaos Suzy’s Villain Origin Story, and potentially Patrick’s as he watched this bolt of brocade die for no good reason

my theory is that Suzy wins the Sewing Bee because I feel like if she hadn’t we would know about it – there’s been no plagues of locusts and all seems in order with the tides, the ultimate spoilers.

The first rung in Suzy’s descent into madness was when her welt pockets went a bit wrong as she’d slashed a hole in the wrong place

this would continue to be a problem for her as she just machine gun fired buttonholes into this jacket like an 11 year old playing Fortnite

her only choice to fix the welt pocket mistake was to pull a Damien and throw a bit of a trim on it and hope that was enough to distract Priya’s magpie-like sensibility

it wasn’t strictly necessary because I think Suzy’s gold standard in hemming horrors was a better diversion of all 5 senses

it’s like she sewed it using the bird-powered sewing machine from The Flintstones

I’m sure he did a great job for 10,000bc and Patrick Granite would’ve been very impressed.

Pascha’s efforts in brocade went slightly better than Suzy’s, possibly because once again she had stayed a safe 10 metres away from anything involving a button

but it was a very nice theory of a jacket with the mannequin and Priya looking like they’d make a great red carpet couple

she’s going to have to fight Kiell for the mannequin’s hand in marriage though

Oi, Kiell! Their eyes are up-… oh.

The rest of the sewers all opted for more nehru-jacket-friendly fabrics – I did like that Luke had added a brocade stand collar to give their jacket a little bit of pizzazz, it was just a pity they’d made it a bit short so the collar was barely collaring

they still managed a respectable third place, knocking Ailsa off podium position as her finishings weren’t as clean but she is two thirds of the way through her Patrick Grant Voodoo doll now

there’s quite a lot of mysterious puckering going on everywhere but it had some buttons and could operate successfully as a jacket which is high praise for this challenge.

Lastly we have Marcus’s military offering which looked the most commercial and saleable of the lot

the only thing putting him in second place was the fact he’d not put the top button in the right place which prevented his collar from having the signature gap

he was the mama bear to Luke’s papa bear.

An Official Nehru Jacket Ranking:
1. Alex, Buttonholer Extraordinaire
2. Mama Bear’s Nehru
3. Papa Bear’s Nehru
4. Ailsa’s Meh-ru Jacket
5. Pascha’s Fear of Buttons
6. Georgie’s GCSE Disqualification
7. Lauren’s Accidental Luxury Pyjamas
8. Chaos Suzy Strikes Again!

An Indian Summer

For their Indian Week Transformation Challenge the sewers were having to make a summer appropriate outfit out of Madras check shirts and Calico – both being fabrics from India

the sewers were asked to use 2 shirts and at least a very specific 1.5 metres of calico fabric

Alex however had taken this as less of a rule and more of a suggestion she didn’t much care for as she tore the very conceit of the show apart

it wouldn’t be an episode of Sewing Bee if someone didn’t flagrantly disregard something Esme had said. Alex ultimately paid the price for it as she plummeted to last place for her lack of calico despite her actual Madras check dress being quite lovely in a sort of “our favourite nursery school teacher” kind of way

Esme’s delivery of “You didn’t use any calico” was exactly the same as Olenna Tyrell’s “Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me.”

they’re spiritually the same person.

The calico was given to the sewers mostly because it would give the sewers an opportunity to give their garments some interesting structure because of its stiffness. Ruffles! Pleats! Avant Garde Gubbins! Or, you know, you could just turn it into a sensible skirt

Marcus got so burnt last week that he was just going to play this episode as safely as possible and hope someone else would crash and burn in a blaze of over ambition

despite this challenge seemingly being made for Suzy who loves a ruffle as much as Pascha hates a button, she also just defaulted to a circle skirt. The twist being that she was going to throw the entire taxonomic genera of pockets at it to see what stuck

and despite the whole thing looking like a marsupial creche

Esme still wanted more pockets

how much more stuff could you possibly have to put in them? Any more and you’d spend a full afternoon trying to find which one you’d put your house keys in! It’s like an advent calendar of lost bits and bobs.

There was no satisfying Esme this round though as Pascha’s little rosettes were deemed not big enough

I can’t say I liked them either, but mostly because they gave me incredibly specific war flashbacks to Angela’s signature rosettes on the third season of Project Runway

nothing on television has ever been more tragically funny than her making those flower-assed capris pants then being flown to out to France only to get told she looked like she had come from a different planet by the most savagely French French Woman you could possibly imagine and sent home IMMEDIATELY

I don’t think anybody has had a worse time in Paris and I count the French aristocracy during 1790s amongst that.

Pascha’s actual outfit though, while not my cup of tea at all, did look a bit like something I could actually see someone wearing

sure that person is a tradwife influencer who makes horrible sugar-free lemonade and has even worse political opinions but that person exists, which is more than I can say for whoever Lauren’s placket crotch-floss playsuit was designed for

In an earlier recap I said I would give £50 to the first person who uses the Transformation Challenge to have Patrick and Esme critique a thong made out of a tie and this is alarmingly close to exactly that. So if Lauren gives me her details, I’ll send her £25.

The judges weren’t entirely keen on Lauren’s outfit and it wasn’t even because the unhinged use of a placket – they didn’t think it was imaginative enough and it turns out the perineal raphe of Madras was only the first layer of Hell, there was more chaos underneath

this was entirely self engineered chaos as, in very cat-like fashion, Lauren yanked at her calico and then seemed aghast that it tore

she wasn’t the only one with an emergency tear as Ailsa was struggling to get her shorts on her caked up mannequin

the nick in the backside wasn’t the talking point of her outfit though as Patrick really wanted a pair of incredibly stiff utilitarian booty shorts

I think that would’ve made the fact she’d managed to give her genital-free mannequin severe camel toe even more obvious. I actually didn’t hate Ailsa’s outfit as a whole and thought she was slightly over penalised for it. There was something quite 90s sitcom wife at the family barbecue about it

I think I would’ve swapped her and Marcus around. This wasn’t the only judging decision I found a little questionable because when Georgie’s came up my mum and I turned to each other and simultaneously said “This is just… nothing”

however the judges were glamoured by the drawstring that allowed you to dramatically reveal your nethers like Drag Race revealing the week’s lipsync assassin

and I can’t say that that piece of engineering doesn’t deserve rewarding but I LOVED what Luke had done – or at least I really liked the top which had a sort of Paco Rabanne feel to it

however, the suggestions of a fish that the scaled circles imply get a little bit too literal when you get to the skirt and suddenly you’ve turned into a salmon centaur. [I wrote this and only upon rereading it did I realise, that’s just a mermaid.] But they only had 90 minutes so I’m amazed Luke got as much of the circle patterning done as they did.

An Official Madras and Calico Summer Outfit Ranking:
1. There’s a Snake In My [Miscellaneous Jumble of Madras Check Glued To My Torso!]
2. Pascha’s Tradwife Pin-up
3. Luke’s Varying Degrees of Implied Fish
4. Just A Nice Dress.
5. Who Likes Short Shorts? Patrick Really Likes Short Shorts.
6. The Taxonomic Tree of Pockets
7. The Crashed Hotdog Car Playsuit
8. The Joffrey Baratheon Maxi Dress

Acclaimed Actress, Sari Enough… No? Ok.

For their Made to Measure Challenge the sewers were having to draw inspiration from the sari to create their garments. The judges were keen to emphasise to the audience that they were expecting something more than a very nice dress with a piece of drapery thrown across the shoulders

which they possibly could’ve emphasised a bit more to the sewers as we now smash-cut to Georgie’s dress which felt the most egregious example of this

but she was far from the only one dooming a second hand sari to a life as a glorified pashmina that whoever’s receiving the Lifetime Achievement at The Oscars wears. Alex had essentially made the same dress as Georgie, just in a nicer colour combination

it was a very pretty sari too which I wish she’d used a little more creatively

but I do wonder how much of that was based on not wanting to be seen as “disrespecting” the sari because people practically dox someone for cutting up an ugly 40 year old mass produced tablecloth to make a questionably fashionable crop top. You’d become The Bean Dad if you turned a sari into someone’s prom dress. Alex’s outfit did also have the issue that at some point her model suffered from a bad case of subsidence

has Homes Under The Hammer taught us nothing? ALWAYS HAVE A SURVEY!

The last of the reclaimed saris came from Luke who had potentially hyped up the intrigue of their garment a little too much

but perhaps I’m too Drag Race pilled and if you’re not leaving the runway looking like the Primark 3 for £5 t-shirt carousel by the end of the day, you’re not doing a reveal

Luke’s grand reveal being that the piece of long fabric was a piece of long fabric all along!

but the short pink dress revealed underneath was really cute and worked wonderfully with the black and gold

The sasha cross the front does look a touch bulky and like it could be used to carry a baby around which would certainly be a reveal, and perfect for the staple drag performance of All Around The World by Lisa Stansfield. I do also love that Luke hasn’t shied away from taking inspiration from drag and continues to annoy all the right people who complain about how often they mention they do drag. Suspiciously they don’t bring up that Suzy mentions her upcoming wedding equally as much and that Marcus is the ultimate Wife Guy.

Speaking of Marcus, equally as guilty of relying on a scarf to serve sari realness

it’s a very pretty fabric though and an absolute nightmare to work with which is probably why he didn’t get around to fully sewing up the sides

quick lie and scream about how it was a VERSACE _inspired ventilation channel

for some reason Marcus’s entire ladder of safety pins didn’t get the halfhearted “it’s punk…” comment from Esme, that was reserved for Lauren who they just wanted to make feel a little better because it seemed like the only thing holding this emergency bedsheet to her model was the Herculean strength of that one safety pin on the shoulder

you do have a moment where you think “This is actually really good!” and then you realise that’s entirely because Lauren’s model carries herself with such regality and poise that she would probably still manage to look like a Queen whose political machinations and cloak and dagger murder spree have paid off spectacularly if you put her in the checkered taint suit

it’s just a theory, we shall not subject her to that.

Lauren wasn’t the only one to have about half of their original design walk down the runway. She was joined in that camp by Pascha but while Lauren’s looked like someone playing Hermia in a community theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pascha’s looked like they were about to do a slow motion strut into the Love Island Villa

there was meant to be about 4 more feet of pleated skirt which is why it’s so BooHoo-coded

but that had to be scrapped because so much of Pascha’s time had to be dedicated to picking the beads off her dress in order to at least attempt to preserve the general needle population of the Sewing Bee

however, even these measures had to go out of the window by the end of it because the modesty of your model matters more than the lives of a needle (the ultimate trolley problem)

and even with the modesty trim I imagine they had to up her model’s fee to get her to walk without yoga pants on

if she so much as sneezes this episode becomes R-rated.

Suzy was also going for a short dress – taking inspiration from a sari’s pleats with her heavily pleated bodice

the sketch did a great job of preparing you for the smooshed bug that this challenge led to for Suzy because if Suzy was on the verge of rapidly evolving telekinetic powers and going Full Magneto Mode after her nehru jacket, the moment she realised she’d made two right-sided pieces for her bodice, the very stability of our universe shook perilously

there was a relatively easy solution in that she just made a plain left piece and buried it under gold mesh like the mafia burying a body in the desert

this didn’t help assuage her fears throughout the rest of the challenge which meant we ended up with a number of transitions where we’d go from Kiell goofing around with the creepy child mannequin directly to Suzy trying not cry into her duchess satin

evil, evil editors. I guffawed every time.

In the end, Suzy actually ended up with a mostly passable dress

it does come with the one downside in that the longer you look at it the more you do realise it’s just non-copyright infringeing Tinkerbell cosplay

on the plus side, we’ve found the Peaseblossom costume for that community theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Lastly we have Ailsa, the runaway train of a winner for this episode as she combined traditional Scottish and sari drapery to create a garment worthy of a particularly fashion forward airbender

I wish it wasn’t quite so crinkly, but the folds and crisp drape has the feel of a couture Thom Browne piece if Thom Browne would so much as even look at a colour. I’ll assume she just didn’t have enough time to steam it because Suzy was wielding the iron like a weapon of mass destruction

IT’S OK SUZY, WE’LL SEND LAUREN HOME! Just step away from the iron!

An Unofficial Sari Inspired Dress Ranking:
1. Orange You Glad It’s Not Just A Dress With a Drape Thrown At It?
2. I’ve Got A Trick Up My…. Sleeve
3. Pascha’s Mass Needle Grave
4. Legally Distinct Green Fairy
5. Alex’s Subsiding Pleats
6. Unnecessarily Punishing Georgie’s Because I Hate the Colour (I’m the Esme now.)
7. Marcus’s Totally Intentional Punk Air Vent
8. Lauren’s Incredibly Regal Bedsheet

Given that Ailsa seemed to be the only one that really ran with the challenge, her Scottish-Indian fusion was an easy win

but to be honest, I was willing to give her the win for her own outfit this week which I’m sure is probably homemade

when we say that Rachel Weisz in the library scene from The Mummy was responsible for an entire generation of queer women, this is what we mean.

The elimination this week came down to a discussion of Lauren and Suzy and because everyone likes being able to live to see tomorrow, Lauren took the hit for the sake of the human race

the Queen of Vibes ’til the very end. We salute you.

And so, brace for Child Mannequins aplenty as we cross over the halfway point into Children’s Week