And this girl doesn’t function, she just cries.

It was Maths Week in disguise all along!

Waste Not, Want Not

Ushering in Trash Week was a Zero Waste pattern challenge in which the sewers would be creating the most hideously utilitarian piece of clothing you’ve ever seen

this jacket has worked in the same soul destroying job for 65 years and is counting down the seconds to retirement or the Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1927. The point of the General Milkman Mao jacket was that it could all be cut out from one piece of fabric without any leftover bits and pieces. Or in the case of Gaynor, could be cut out of one piece of fabric and somehow create more fabric, like a sort of haberdashery Jesus feeding the many as she ended up with a pair of sleeves 4 inches longer than the pattern allowed for

at first I thought “She must have cut the length of fabric too long” but that doesn’t even explain it, because the sleeves are cut out of the middle of it!

I need a slow playback of all the footage of Gaynor. I need to solve the mystery of this Extendo-armed Georgie From It jacket (which does have significantly more arm than Georgie has, come to think of it)

I mean at least the gibbon arms make it interesting! Most of these garments were a parade of Factory Worker Realness – except Kit and Caz, the latter of which had naturally gravitated towards pink

and Kit who was apparently sending Elmer the Elephant off on his first day of work in the mines

while everyone melted under the weight of having to do mental maths for the first time since having to work out what time the train travelling at 62 miles per hour arrives in Darlington if it leave St Pancras at 3pm but stops for 15 minutes because of a cow on the track in a GCSE exam, Kit was having the time of their life

they can now do a PhD about Gaynor’s Sleeves.

Stuart however was just a little bit too happy when he realised he’d managed to calculate 9×2

sadly he had not managed to divide the length of the jacket by 5 correctly and thus ended up with just 4 buttons

the fifth one having been sucked into whichever extradimensional haberdashery Gaynor’s sleeves had spawned from

but at least Stuart had some buttons, the same could not be said for Dan who had just been held up by the maths equations and not got around to it

Jess probably struggled the most with the mats as she unfortunately miscalculated the front of her jacket, throwing off the measurement of everything else

meaning her jacket did look a little bit like a piece of barely surviving costuming in the British Industrial Museum’s dress-up box

I do have to applaud her for even continuing to manhandle this jacket into an even vaguely passable existence, I would have started crying the moment I’d realised that I’d miscalculated anything and jumped from the window the moment it continued to go wrong

braver than the troops.

Orla had gone for some extra brownie points by doing a contrasting pink top stitch on her dark denim which did look really nice and at least mitigated the relentlessly mundane uniformity of this jacket (I just want to see fun clothes, guys – IS WHIMSY DEAD?)

and while most of it was done absolutely superbly, she’s accidentally top stitched the collar the wrong way up

but the quality of her sewing was still good enough to get her that second place.

Lastly we have Yamsin who chose a fabric that only adds to the exhausted malaise of this garment

this jacket has spent 50 years delivering milk at 4am and is so tired. Please let him stop.

An Official Zero Waste Workwear Jacket Ranking:
1. Elmer Goes To The Mines
2. Every Cloud Has A… Pink Lining
3. Yasmin’s Late Retiring Milkman
4. The Quality Controller at the Bubblegum Factory
5. ONLY 4 BUTTONS?
6. Dan’s Quick Reveal Jacket
7. Gaynor’s Besleeved Mircle Working
8. Jess’s Uniform Calamity

An In Tents Situation

The Trashion Week Transformation Challenge is routinely one of the best televised events of the year for me, and this year’s in which the sewers had to turn an abandoned festival tent into a festival-ready outfit did not disappoint. Nobody was better positioned for this challenge than Dan who feels like their entire life has led up to this singular opportunity to make a costume for Kitana from Mortal Kombat to wear while doing a bucketful of cocaine at Coachella

it is an absurd garment, but my God if it isn’t an absolutely phenomenally well sewn absurd garment and a very deserved first place finish for him. And then we have the Player 2 option from Orla which… might be less successful because it does look a bit like someone dressed up as a sexy frog for Halloween, which is of course a completely valid festival outfit

I think Orla’s pants looking like someone improvised a pair of knickers out of a bio-degradable shopping bag only really serve to make Dan’s look that much more well made

but while it felt Dan could autopilot anything even vaguely festival inspired, Gaynor was a little more adrift

and her final outfit did look a little bit like the traditional mourning garb of a high street salon owner

but Patrick and Esme did enjoy the little kangaroo pocket she’d made for all those festival essentials: mobile, paracetamol, MDMA, back up paracetamol, back up MDMA and of course back up for the back MDMA

While Gaynor’s outfit was also largely grey and quite dower (a funeral can be a festival if you try hard enough), she didn’t get dinged for Esme Suddenly Deciding She Hates A Colour, that was reserved for Caz because she’s been flying a little too close to the sun recently

YOU CAN’T CRITIQUE THE COLOURS WHEN YOU GAVE THEM A GREY TENT, ESME. Caz did still manage to come second for this Amish woman celebrates Ascension Day dress

this dress is married to Yasmin’s workwear jacket and the only reason they aren’t divorced is religious pressure and the amount of rage you can work through with a butter churn.

Kit has also never been to a festival – neither have I, as someone who is both sun and mud adverse, I feel like Glastonbury is where I’d go to die a violent and undignified death. But they succeeded in creating something that felt at least a little bit like something a drag queen with a glue gun would make for this exact challenge on Drag Race

the singular No-cooking nipple cover is very fun

I kind of wish they had two but I do also enjoy the idea of going pirate-mode with your tits. They also truly got the best pull with that patterned tent which adds a lot of fun dimension to the skirt which could have potentially felt a bit like a bit of a throwaway piece.

Kit wasn’t the only one to improve nipple covers, Yasmin’s girly was very much going to the same party drug fuelled tent as Dan’s

I adore this – she’s got ridiculous tanlines but she doesn’t care, she’s doing the Apple choreography front row at the Charli XCX performance. Charli’s not performing Apple, Charli’s not even on stage, it’s Pulp, but nothing is stopping this absolute queen – not even Jarvis Cocker pelting her with teabags.

And then amongst all of this nonsense, you have Stuart. Good old sensible Stuart has never met a Transformation Challenge material that hasn’t at least made him consider a skirt

to be fair “Woman reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar in the Creche at the Edinburgh International Book Festival” is still at a festival. She’ll also paint your face like a butterfly for £10.

Lastly we have Jess who had grand dreams of creating a big puffball skirt

however, Kit had promptly driven over that like a monster truck with their extremely voluminous confection of a skirt, so Jess’s did fall just a little bit flat

it’s a bit wilted looking – like one of the kalamata olives in the tub you find hiding at the back of the fridge 2 weeks after you opened them (I don’t think my family has ever successfully finished a tub of olives, we sort of just leave them there like an offering for the fridge gremlins). Jess mostly got dinged for not using enough of the tent’s extra features which I don’t know was an entirely fair critique given she’d engineered the puff sleeves using a drawstring which I thought was quite clever.

An Official Festival Outfit Ranking:
1. FATALITY! *sniff*
2. Angry Churning Butter In The Barn
3. Yaaarg, There Be No Cookin’ ‘Ere
4. I’m a Frog, Duuuuuuh.
5. A Very Sad Hairdress
6. ROBBED QUEEN
7. 15:00: Reading Julia Donaldson For 5 Year Olds
8. Jess’s *pfffft*ball Dress

Make Do and Meh-nd

The one pitfall in the fully fledged success of Dumpster Diving Week is the Made to Measure, which always feels like a Transformation Challenge in sheep’s second-hand clothing. This year’s turning second-hand clothes into discombobulated second-hand clothes in the tradition of Make Do and Mend, more so than many others. But it means Amber Butchart got to talk about wartime Britain

she had to go for a cold shower afterwards.

The attempt to jazz it all up a bit was that the clothes had to be fit for a party – which is essentially the Sewing Bee equivalent of the fabled Woman at an Art Gallery Opening on Project Runway – you’d think New York had a new art gallery opening every weekend. While I think most of the clothing could be seen at A Nonspecific Event or Party™ – Stuart just rendered an ill-advised shag in the stationary cupboard at the office Christmas party in clothes

which I suppose does require you to be at a party! While I hate the skirt with the burning intensity of 1000 suns – it just looks like you’ve put your partner’s suit over your lap because you’re incapable of eating nachos without getting guacamole *somewhere*

but I do kind of love the back of it when his model does this “Nothing beats a Jet2 Holiday” pose

the whole thing does still feel very Transformation Challenge coded though. Which is to say, it could maybe be knocked up in 90 minutes as opposed to the likes of Caz who was doing a jigsaw of her husband’s worn out crotch for more than half the challenge

denim seemed a very obvious choice for this challenge and I think we could’ve done with maybe stipulating against it but maybe I am also just looking through the lens of Caz talking about her family’s jeans amidst Sydney Sweeney’s Eugenicsy Denim Campaign. However both denim pieces were kind of great, even if we’ve seen them or clothing very similar before

the pops of brocade were necessary to elevate it, and again it’s those sort of details that do make Caz a very exciting contestant to watch on this show.
Kit was also doing denim, with the necessary jeans being sourced from their friends – “my friends have great jeans” at least being less… eugenicsy

a swing dress doesn’t usually grab my interest but the panelling of that bodice and the movement of the skirt were stunning – the skirt swished more than I thought denim really could. Kit’s friends really do have great jeans!

Somehow, Christmas was just as popular as denim with Orla repurposing an outfit her mother never ended up wearing into the coquettish daughter with a bad reputation of Dan’s Festive Maternity Wear For Pregnant Elves last week

in the context of it being a dress you specifically wear once a year and let it languish at the back of your wardrobe for the remaining 364 days of the year (flawless execution of the Make Do and Mend concept, guys), it’s cute enough!

Dan was also going festive, transforming the matching pyjamas of the Fiat 500 von Trapp family

this is where I got a touch confused because Patrick asked “How many pyjamas did you start with” and Dan responds with “13”

and I HAVE to assume he misunderstood the question because the implication as is, is that this dress required 13 pyjama tops which… feels the opposite of the Make Do and Mend ethos

I’m not sure I personally like the dress, but it might also be a Chicken Nugget Situation wherein I only dislike it because I saw how it was made so I know the top is just a game of festive Klotski and I can still read “Christmas” (I think I actually like the fabric reversed more)

what I will say for Dan is that it is by far the most ambitious and also cleanest thing he’s sewn all series and I’m glad he could have this moment with this make specifically because it meant a lot to him. And because it had so much emotional weight behind it, it does unfortunately mean the muff jokes are off limits

The Memorial Muff is a snarky recapper’s kryptonite.

Jess was also using clothing of her mother’s, although in this case her mum’s dental hygienist lab coat was not being turned into a muff, instead she’d used the buttons for the back which was a nice little detail

unfortunately I’m not entirely sure the dress quite came together for Jess – it just looks a little bit tortured and overdesigned

if that peplum frill had been on the sleeves, I think it would look a lot cuter. BUT, I do think this looks the most like something someone in post-war Britain makes out of their curtains to wear to church. That’s at least something. It was also probably an overall stronger outfit than Gaynor’s which looks like Mr. Mistoffelees performing with Blanche Devereaux at the Rusty Anchor

there’s something awkward about the whole ensemble and I got the impression her model just did not know how to actually wear it. The fabric is beautiful and doing a lot to carry the rest of it. I may have liked it more if there’d been a blouse under it? If only Gaynor had 13 days worth of Norwegian cruising (not like that) outfits to work with

when is the Gaynor and Jane MacDonald crossover event happening?

Last year Chaos Suzy spent most of a series dry running the some 17 wedding outfits she was going to sew herself this summer. A task that would turn even the most well fortified mind to slurry. However, Suzy has only come out the other end of that gauntlet stronger and more chaotic than ever

just in case you were wondering how Chaos Suzy is doing – she has been ordained The Pickle Pope.

Yasmin, was carrying Suzy’s torch and was dry running her own engagement party playsuit, the statement feature of which were the satin godets – Satin Godet also being the name of a girl Novello went to school with

it’s cute and it’s clean, which is all you could really want from a garment for your wedding adjacent celebrations. There was a slightly wonky hemline but the key parts like the godets were extremely well executed. AND IT’S GOT POCKETS

grand.

A Make Do and Mend Ranking:
1. Kit’s Skirt Go Spinny
2. Caz’s Husband’s Very Talked About, Very Worn Crotch
3. yrrMe HsCTmrisA
4. It’s Got Pockets For Secrets
5. Staple Me Like One Your Production Reports
6. The Other End of the Elven Binary
7. Jess’s 1940s Time Machine
8. Mister Mistoffolee’s Evening of Table Magic

The Made to Measure wasn’t really a challenge with any stand out pieces, it was very much a Make Do and Get By challenge. I did get the feeling they *wanted* to give it to Caz for her denim jumpsuit but they don’t want it to become a bit of a steamrolling and for some reason we’re edging Kit so in the end Garment of the Week went to Dan for his Festive Codebreaking dress

I do firmly believe Dan deserved Garment of the Week, but I unironically think it should’ve been for his Transformation Challenge outfit – it had absolutely no business being as well constructed and sewn as it was.

After losing both of the prior challenges, Jess was going to have to pull off something pretty spectacular for her Made to Measure and sadly it just wasn’t to be for her (also, they HAD to take Gaynor to Children’s Week, it’s like a legal requirement – you saw the crocodile.)

I’ll miss her Transformation Challenge eye-rolling most of all.

And so, 7 will combat the dislocating limbs of the child mannequins: