This is my Roman Empire.

G note intensifies.

Pyjama, Kudos For Sewing That. For Piping.

Ok, now that you’re all done congratulating me for that challenge title, we can get this show on the road.

Lingerie Week wasn’t getting off to the sexiest of starts, you have to ease everyone into Marcus’s Explorations of Kink. So instead we start with the more sedate, breakfast in bed end of the lingerie spectrum: the luxury pyjama blouse

so on top of trying to wrangle silks and satins like mad scientists who regret ever splicing together the DNA of European Eels and ferrets, they had to create their own contrast piping. Said piping was billed as the trickiest part of the challenge, however something tells me that bit may have been discussed before they were aware of quite how deep the bad blood ran between this batch of sewers and buttonholes

and much like the last time everyone (and by “everyone” I do mean “Suzy Specifically”) had a mexican showdown with a handful of buttons, Alex breezed through it having worked out that if you don’t make direct eye contact with it, the automatic buttonholer can’t sense your fear

meanwhile, in the Suzy vs Buttons Royal Rumble: IT’S THE BUTTONFOOT WITH A STEEL CHAIR!

I think Suzy might actually fully disprove Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. If the Galapagos Finches had this much trouble eating seeds, they would never have made it to the theoretical eighth week of the evolutionary adaptation AND YET, despite Suzy’s pyjama blouse looking like it had barely survived Tropical Storm Suzy, she lives to fight another week

she’s the little finch that accidentally could.

She wasn’t the only one with a pyjama blouse that looked like it was going through a medical emergency. Ailsa’s Christmas blouse looked like it was herneating, such is the perils of satin

it did also feel like someone needs a 5 week stint of community service for making me hear Christmas music in July, even if it was the Leona Lewis banger

still somehow not the wildest needle drop of the episode and I’m not just talking about Cilla’s Surprise, Surprise but we’ll get to the G note.

Alex had also gone for a green pyjama, although she was avoiding the temporally displaced Jingle Bells but instead piping it with a really beautiful copper colour

which for some unknown reason Patrick didn’t think was going to work as a colour combination

the way he said that with such confidence as though the whole world doesn’t briefly stand still everytime Jessica Chastain’s hair so much as looks at the colour green

so it was no surprise to me personally when the Jessica Chastain of loungewear looked very striking and regal. Plus her fabric reminded me of the really sexy fish from The Shape of Water

the girls who get it, get it and the girls who don’t, don’t.

While Alex fully embraced the contrast in the contrast piping, Marcus was in desperate need of a spectrum intervention because he’d chosen a colour you’d only ever get if you mixed every other colour together

enter Professor Luke PhD (Philosopher of Drag)

thus Marcus was persuaded to choose a stark white piping that better complimented his floral PJs that looked a bit like you could buy them off the back of the TV Guide magazine during the lead up to Remembrance Weekend (sleep in maximum respect)

or at least the piping that had actually bothered to show up to the party complimented his fabric. Other than the occasionally shy piping it was a mostly ok pyjamas blouse. Which in this round did mean that it buttoned up semi-correctly.

Marcus was only narrowly pushed into the bottom half of the leaderboard by Luke, whose hot pink pyjama top looked the most pyjama-ish to me

the addition of the contrast buttons is a nice touch. Also a brave gamble considering Suzy was feeding the buttonholes after midnight

GREMLIN RULES, SUZY! GREMLIN RULES!

Lastly we have Pascha who… I have only two notes written about: “Pascha’s boyfriend’s silk kimono” and “it looks neat”

barely featuring in a challenge where everyone was screaming about going to war with buttonholes and vowing revenge against the entire bombyx genus is probably the biggest compliment they can pay to Pascha. Also, looking up silk moths for that reminded me of the time I won a shoebox of silkworms from a Tombola. Which is only a marginally better prize than the 3-2-1 Dusty Bin booby prize

this episode has made far more of an impression on me than it probably ever should’ve. There’s a 90% chance they filed for divorce as soon as the cameras cut.

A Pyjama Blouse Ranking:
1. Alex’s Sexy Amphibian Pyjamas
2. Pascha Being Pascha
3. Luke’s Contrast Thesis
4. Marcus Wins The Poppy War 2024
5. Ailsa’s Satin Chest Burster
6. Tropical Storm Suzy Strikes Again

Throwing Shapes

Now we come to the portion of the episode that is ~sexy~ on paper and a nightmarish Victorian house of ill repute in practice as the sewers were each given 2 pieces of shapewear, 2 metres of lace and 2 tablespoons of laudanum. Pascha took the good old Frankenstein approach and just began grafting on strips of ribbon and stapling random appendages of lace everywhere she could in the hope it would eventually look like… something

this entire challenge was a complete wilderness and Pascha’s does look a bit like something doomed to be Ann Summers deadstock because I can’t think of who simultaneously requires a turtleneck and for their crotch to have a dramatic theatre curtain pulley system reveal

Oh. OK. Carry on. Basic Instinct as written by Susan Hill is kind of a slay, actually.

Ailsa’s adventures in Doing The Same Thing As Pascha sadly didn’t work out for her

despite the fact it looks vaguely wearable if you don’t mind being garrotted by your own bra strap, they mostly dinged her on the grounds there wasn’t any white lace on the top half of the outfit. Which is the weirdest issue to pick with an outfit that looks like you gave your left boob an afro wig.

The only people who actually ended up pieces that looked like clothes were Alex and Luke. Everyone else was either to lace as babies are to their first encounter with spaghetti

or… Marcus creating a gender dysphoria bodystocking which I do not have the energy to discuss yet, I need to rest upon a rock of normality before I cross that ocean. SO, LUKE!

This is actually really good and was completely undersold. I could see someone wearing this. Sure that person smells of sage and patchouli and relies a little too heavily on her tarot readings to guide their life decision making but they exist and they run a crystal shop called Auras ‘n’ Thingz that has somehow remained in business for 20 years.

Alex had gone to the other end of the spandex and lace spectrum, with the white swan to Luke’s witchy black swan

she can insist as much as she wants that this is ballet inspired but Ma’am, this is a mid-budget sexy Gretel costume. Granted, it’s tasteful enough that you could wear it to both Oktoberfest and to take cute aesthetic photos in the Red Rose Tavern at Disneyland without getting kicked out

a knife edge to balance upon.

Now we have to inevitably talk about The Chaos Twins, Marcus and Suzy, who both lost their minds and touched the sort of sublime you can only touch if you’ve not slept for 3 days and try to write an essay about what the chicken in City of God represents. Suzy had talked a big game about going for something Lara Croft inspired

what we ended up with wasn’t far off in that it had the same sort of Action Woman Made For Men vibe. It was just less Tomb Raider and more Marge Simpson’s jumpsuit being strategically eaten by White Blood Cells which would most certainly not contain Lara Croft’s low poly rhomboid boobs

and what is the Transformation Challenge but the Sewing Bee’s own white blood cells attacking the very definition of taste and decency?

When Patrick and Esme were giving the brief to the sewers, they did stress that they wanted something “interesting and exciting”. Marcus would take this to heart and dared to ponder “What if Timothee Chalamet got the role of King Kong?” (Twink Konk?)

if I wrote a King Kong origin story musical with Timothee as the lead, I do fully believe I could convince Warner Bros. to greenlight it. It’s also a jukebox musical and they of course since Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl

and while Marcus has triggered a whole new era for the MonsterVerse and potentially predicted The Norwegian Salmon Heir at the Met Gala

he did seem to forget that this had to be actual clothes, busying himself too much with making sure his abs were properly constructed lest he dress his mannequin up as a kangaroo shoe rack

he had to abandon armholes, so what we actually got was a sort of muscular snake, of which I can only find one safe for work image of from an episode of Rick and Morty

and judging by the other works of art I saw and will never unsee, Marcus has once again accidentally stumbled into kink. He’s now an honorary Scaly.

A Shapewear Transformation Ranking:
1. Gothic Horror Basic Instinct
2. Whatever The Disneyland Equivalent of Oktoberfest Is
3. I Don’t Know Why Luke’s Gift Shop Witch Didn’t Win
4. Suzy’s Sexy Charlotte’s Web
5. Always The Bridesmaid Never The Pascha
6. Unironically Believing Marcus Was Robbed

Go Big, Or Go Bustier

For their final dip into the Agent Provocateur catalogue, the sewers were creating dresses that featured bustier tops. However the most ill-advised Valentine’s Day gift this challenge ever got was Kiell’s boning jokes

everyone went a lot classier than I was personally hoping What’s the point of the post-watershed scheduling that means your mother misses half the show because she’s fallen asleep in the middle of the Transformation Challenge if you’re not all going to make Sexy Pirate Wench Halloween costumes?

ok, fair point Suzy, we already went to that well.

We weren’t completely devoid of kink though as Ailsa was taking the Christian Grey approach to boning

however, Ailsa wasn’t doing mass produced, easily digestible erotica as she introduced us to The Anti-corset

which is a pretty cool idea but her corset did promptly became the most corsety corset that ever corseted when she got the measurements slightly wrong and ended up cutting off all of her model’s circulation below the waist

so while the back was a bit of a nightmare with the corset not closing properly and the attachment of the skirt looking like a bit like a nappy

from the front it did look… ok? The black velvet corset with the tactical lesbian hardware straps looks really cool however I am unconvinced by the skirt which… looks a bit like it’s been given wings for better leak protection

I also spent the rest of the week agonising over where I had seen this dress before, entirely convinced someone had worn something VERY similar to an awards ceremony. I then realised I think I’m conflating two dresses: Lily Collins’s Vera Wang gown at the Lagerfeld themed Met Gala and Kelly Rowland’s Messika gown at the Vanity Fair Oscar party this year

I am the Amber Butchart we have at home. I can’t teach you about the history of unethical corsetry but I can bring up a rolodex of red carpet moments.

Ailsa wasn’t the only person to embrace alt fashion. Although I’m not entirely sure how “alt” it is if I feel like you can dangle it in front of Dua Lipa and she’d take the bait. But for Sewing Bee, it’s alt, as was Marcus embracing nuclear levels of 2007 Blue Banana energy

and despite the fact he name dropped My Chemical Romance’s Welcome To the Black Parade AND the show used footage from the music video I still thought that come the runway, his model would be walking out to Sk8er Boi by Avril Lavigne because in no uncertain terms, she did absolutely wear this outfit to The Grammys at least 5 times between 2002 and 2010

but like every teenager that went through a depressive episode in the mid-2000s, my pavlovian response to do the Black Parade march kicked in the moment I heard the G-note kick in during the end of Ailsa’s not great critique (a perfect use of it, might I add.)

and I can tell you, 15 year old Ariadne The Emo Girlie That Never Was would have thought that this outfit was the coolest thing she’d ever seen and would’ve put it straight onto the Year 11 Prom moodboard. I wish they’d gone for the ful MySpace styling: where are the ripped fishnets, the clipped in blue streak and Baby’s First Attempt at Eyeliner? Without it, this is merely sparkling Bebo.
Some of the construction was a bit iffy – namely around the boob cups which did kind of scream “I have never had to think about boobs in this much detail before!” in that they were somehow protruding away from the bust and also completely flat – like some sort of mammalian black hole

but he wasn’t the only one to have some bustier fit issues as Suzy’s cups also sat quite far from the chest

but Suzy was up against it this week as her own personal sewing style doesn’t really suit the intricacy and fiddliness of Lingerie Week

but she was going to make this as close to Ruffles and Gubbins Week as she possibly could with the addition of a massive Esme pleasing ruffle tacked on to the bottom as a Hail Mary as an obligatory Suzyism (it’s an official art movement now, get into it.)

obviously the fact it’s the colour of one of those retro jelly salads is also key to the Suzy Renaissance

it was a lot of intricate puzzle piecing that did work out really well for her – the colour blocking could really have highlighted any mistakes she’d made. While I might not be a fan of the radioactive dolly mixture colours, it is the sort of purposefully garish that you could easily have persuaded early career Paloma Faith to wear

I miss Annoying Living-In-The-Shadow-of-Amy-Winehouse-And-Definitely-Not-Having-A-Complex-About-It Paloma. She’s still annoying, it’s just more Not-On-The-Highstreet-Feminist-Wall-Mural branded annoying

I blame Sigala.

Suzy had at least brought some much needed colour to the challenge because everyone else either went for black, white or beige. So much so, Luke’s navy gown was practically lurid

and ended up being the classier version of Britney and Justin’s Canadian tuxedo wedding (it’s SEO, baby!)

I shall remain silent on my baseless dislike for navy and black as a colour combination lest I become The Esme™.

As well as the intricacy of boning a corset, Luke had also made things difficult for themself by deciding to pleat the breast cups which we’d been treated to a long lingering shot of when you have enough time to do them successfully

and unfortunately Luke had had to rush through a bit of their pleating so it did look a bit like their model had two coin purses protecting her modesty, but not in the fun camp Moschino way

the boning of the corset was very good and if nothing else, they at least got an official corsetry assistant with Kiell offering to give them a good old fashioned kick and push

I’d let Kiell give me a goo-

FINE.

Given that Pascha has made a historically accurate Georgian ballgown in her spare time, it was no surprise that she sailed through this challenge while bragging about her very expensive lace

and having her gathering treated to a Jesus Light like it was singing Hallelujah in the X-factor Finale

so naturally she ended up with the dress that looks like it would’ve gone down as one of the best things Veronica Lake ever wore

it’s really quite lovely and I like how much it does reference lingerie with the lace panel on the bustier. This does feel like the point where the other sewers better realise that they need to construct an elaborate long con to take Pascha out before she fully runs away with this competition. Throw a few bobbins around like marbles in Showgirls.

Lastly we have Alex who was going for an Inside Out dress, not in a filling it with anxiety way (that was Suzy’s) but in a simply inverting everything kind of way

I adore this, it’s very romantic with a decent amount of added sex appeal from the mesh. The outer tulle was a touch long, but I LOVE a dress that requires you to walk around while holding, I think it’s so regal. Sadly I never get to do it because I always forget the models are 5’7″ and I’m 6’1″ so my attempts to dress like the most luxurious Victorian widow are always scuppered. You’d think that and this show would’ve encouraged me to sew my own clothes but I’m too traumatised from breaking 3 sewing machines in a single Home Ec class.

An Unofficial Bustier Dress Ranking:
1. Pascha’s Theoretical Veronica Lake
2. Inside Out 2: Anxiety Tulle Boogaloo
3. Luke’s Boob Purses
4. Suzy’s Paloma faith in Aspic
5. My Teenage Dream Dress
6. Ailsa’s Anti-corset Melodrama

Having breezed through Lingerie Week entirely unscathed, Garment of the Week was down to Pascha and Alex’s made to measure gowns. They were both really good but some of the finishing on Pascha’s just put her ahead of Alex

and then we had the elimination which came down to either Marcus or Ailsa with Suzy having suitably redeemed herself. Either way, we were losing a Blog Fave and it was a much of a muchness between them. I did think Ailsa was a goner purely for how unfinished her skirt was, but in the end Marcus was hearing the dreaded G note

I have adored his Sewing Bee journey and it would have been a significantly more boring series without him, his knitted rabbit sex hood and the muscly worm stocking. Lives have been changed.

And so, 5 go on to party at Divas Week that Is Secretly Just Drag Week But Don’t Tell Your Grandma