Me going through Gender Stuff™ in 2012.

Tell me at which point my film degree becomes annoying.

The Birds is the Words

It’s Movie Week in the Sewing Bee which means that, as with Strictly Come Dancing’s own Movie Week, there’s a 90% chance of anyone turning up in a wig that looks like it was made from your grandmother’s spare knitting wool

In another similar vein to Strictly, in order to stop this being Unofficial Premature Halloween, everything has to be *incredibly* specific with the Pattern Challenge being the jacket Edith Head designed for Tippi Hedren in The Birds that definitely couldn’t be a pattern challenge any other week

which to further stress the movie week theme, has a pattern like a Christopher Nolan film: there’s 17 parts and a hole for the plot to fall through at the end

or in the case of Caz you hack at your jacket like it’s the scene of Liam Neeson jumping over a fence in Taken 3 and before you know it you’ve got 15 cuts and 2 gussetty holes in your jacket

in his book, The Hero’s Journey, John Campbell describes this as The Ordeal – a moment in a narrative structure during which a character is at their lowest point BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T LISTEN TO THE MENTORS AND THEIR OBVIOUSLY FORESHADOWING ADVICE

there’s really no excuse, you had 1 Fanny and Alexander to complete this challenge in! Despite Caz having to scrap more of her jacket’s production than X-Men: Dark Phoenix had to, her final jacket actually looked like a wearable jacket, which is more than can be said for Dark Phoenix looking like a movie (it is one of my hyperfixations – if I ever get around to starting that YouTube channel, it’s on the list)

I was very impressed with just how composed Caz managed to remain despite the slowly sinking ship. I’d have gone full woman-on-the-edge in a Lifetime movie and badly applied my lipstick while throwing everyone else’s garments out the 3rd floor window. Instead Caz’s only real issue was that she’d got the top and bottom part of her collar mixed up. A mistake that Orla and Yasmin both lined up to make

do you know who didn’t get their collar mixed up? The Personification of the Smoking Gun in the room

Oh your pockets are wonky? KIT’S AREN’T

you didn’t iron your pattern? KIT DID

drink every time they cut from someone doing something wrong to Kit doing it correctly like they’re a moustache twirling villain in the corner. I think my favourite was during the sleeve chaos as everyone struggled to romance the sleeves

and Kit gave us a very graphic demonstration of how the sleeve and its lining copulate

you see, it’s very similar to sea cucumber reproduction. But before we get too deep into the weeds of broadcast fertilisation (don’t kink-shame the echinoderms, please.) Kit’s jacket was very good – I love the yellow-brown wool they used

there was just the problem that they’d top-stitched their gusset as a… shortcut(?)

KIT NO! YOU’VE GIVEN PATRICK A SOAP BOX! THE GUSSET IS NO LONGER SUBTEXT!

there’s a director’s cut with an extra 15 minutes of footage – 13 of them are the rest of Patrick’s gusset speech and the other 2 are Esme’s scene as Tom Bombadil.

Lastly we have Gaynor who had also got her collar pieces mixed up but the more egregious mistake was that she hadn’t finished so the lining was hanging out the bottom

it’s unclear how Kit telling her to just cut things off like the devil on her shoulder impacted any of this

but I am choosing to believe it was sabotage because I am incredibly invested in Kit’s villain arc.

An Official Edith Head Jacket Ranking:
1. Kit’s Unstretchable Gusset
2. Orla’s Reversed Collar
3. Yasmin’s Reversed Collar 2
4. Caz’s Magnum Oops-us
5. Gaynor’s Self-expunged Lining

It’s Curtains For You!

For their Movie Week Transformation Challenge the sewers were having to make outfits suitable for an awards After Party. Sadly the materials at hand weren’t whatever Doctor Who monster costumes the BBC still has in the back shed – I’d love to see Kit turning one of the Menoptra into couture

or just to see Gaynor coming face-to-face with the soggy pantomime horse known as The Myrkka

but alas, it was Cinema Curtains and everyone had the same red velvet

despite all starting on the same foot, it was far from the same journey for all them. Orla started with grand ambitions of sending her adult-sized polyotter to Cannes

unfortunately her French Riviera floatation device turned into more of an ungainly straitjacket for the criminally insane bourgeoise – it’s not a padded cell, it’s quilted and it’s Chanel

but rather than commit to the sunk cost like Warner Brothers being forced to make that godforsaken Harry Potter TV series for the next decade and a half, Orla tossed that dead horse drapery to one side and begged the fourth wall for a new set of Curtains like she was trapped in a sitcom in the early 2010s

and with only 15 minutes of the challenge to go, all Orla could really do was lose her mind and hope she managed to get something out on time like Steven Spielberg snorting cocaine and making up Jurassic Park 3 as they went along

it is obviously little more than a single couch cushion with a dream and every part of you is catching the draft. However, it is not out of the realm of possibility for an awards show after party. Hunter Schafer famously turned up the Oscars after party wearing but a feather and a bedsheet

I will not rest until we have canonically sexy trans Zelda.

Orla wasn’t the only one having more cutting issues than Thelma Schoonmaker trying to make The Snowman make sense as Caz refused to listen from The Affair of the Underarm Gusset

I imagine seeing Orla wheeling up her Leg Avenue pelmet made her feel at least a little bit better about her really quite cute shift dress

I actually really love the front and think it captures that very sleek retro look that Anya Taylor Joy has a fondness for. The back doesn’t have any of that and just sort of looks like an animation test error for Shrek in which a character’s arms extend grotesquely

As soon as they were given the red velvet curtains as their materials, I had envisioned something vampiric and dramatic that evokes a bit of Dracula

and Yasmin gave me all of the bloodsucking, eternally living vampire mommy I could’ve hoped for

I just think this is stunning – make Christine Baranski wear it on the Gilded Age immediately! No idea if that works, I don’t watch that show, I simply absorb it second hand from the gay men I follow on Bluesky and I think they’d like to see Christine Baranski in heavy red velvet doing conniving things.

Despite the mileage of fabric they’d been given, Kit went for a very sweet and simple sweetheart neckline

I do love the sort of vintage inspiration of the dress and there’s some great work in the making of the corseted top but I had hoped for something that maybe pushed everything a bit further. If you’d presented me with this lineup of outfits blind – I’d have guessed this was Gaynor’s on account of it being simple and suitable for the jazz evening on a cruise ship. Instead Gaynor had opted for a dress that gives you 360 degrees of cleavage

it’s at least interesting even if it’s interesting in a way that I don’t think you could convince a lot of people to wear it.

A Curtain Transformation Outfit Ranking:
1. STEP ON ME MOMMY DRACULA
2. Do You Like Jazz?
3. Party at the Front, 404 ERROR at the Back
4. Gaynor’s Doughnut of Cleavage
5. From Cannes to Cancelled

Horror Scopes

Here’s where we really run aground on the jagged rocks of spooky season as the sewers are tasked with creating costumes for horror movie villains THAT DEFINITELY AREN’T FANCY DRESS

but invariably because they are home sewers with a 5 hour time limit and not Colleen Atwood, they do all end up looking like Halloween costumes. Extremely good Halloween costumes, I will stress! I think the point was to mostly not just replicate a movie villain – the BBC can only license so many Universal Monster screenshots and Amber Butchart ate that budget right up. But if you can keep it in-house, that’s fine! Say “Doctor Who” as many times as you want

Kit’s did feel the most like a recreation of something that came before it, however it was SO good – the face alone was worth Garment of the Week and did at least feel like their own original design

and you try telling someone furiously stabbing a hessian shirt that they should be doing something else

I imagine that the brief specified everyone had to include a headpiece and joining Kit in complete facial obfuscation was Orla who did have to perform the occasional breathing test to make sure her model was still alive because she refused to poke holes in it like a responsible hamster owner

Orla’s horror monster came with a very high concept of one doll shoving bodies into another doll like it was making a Turducken that she explained to Patrick and Esme with the energy of a 5 year old telling their really checked out parents a very obviously not true story

but the result is VERY good, her creature design was really clever – all the proportions are thrown off just enough to still obviously be human but also distinctly weird – the waistline, the placement of the eyes and length of the sleeves; it’s just clever and the reveal of the spine is perfect

obviously, the elephant in the room though is that she blatantly and flagrantly ripped off Baby Button-eyes

get ready for court, Orla. I have the best lawyer in town

while Orla and Kit went very overt with the scare factor, Caz wanted to create a character that was more ambiguous in their alignment

so like, nothing obviously evil? Got it

CAZ. That’s just a Mage of Zamorak – they wear red and worship a god whose name begins with a Z so you know they’re evil

it was a very good costume design though, not perfectly executed, but the judges appreciated her attempt to do something quite difficult for her headpiece with the corseted neckpiece, even if it did curl at the edges

despite the apparent ambiguity of Caz’s creature dressed like the Devil on casual friday, it was Gaynor’s Mari-Morgan that struggled to convince the judges of her moral alignment

it’s a very pretty dress and I would love to it wear it for cosplay as my one D&D character whose whole thing is that he’s a constantly wet elf. Gaynor did say she was incapable of doing something scary

but like… you only have to be as scary as The Strictly Come Dancing Pegging Devil

but Gaynor pulled a Dan Walker and insisted she’ll only be as scary as everything living underwater is

she is a good god-fearing woman and you shall not make her sin!

Lastly we have Yasmin whose costume was inspired by the Trinidadian legend of La Diablesse – a devil women that lured men into the jungle and ate them – GOD FORBID A WOMAN HAVE HOBBIES

it is noticeably lacking a headpiece – a key part of the La Diablesse legend is that every day is a say something hat day for her WAIT A MINUTE

and she’s always depicted with an EXTREMELY wide-brimmed sun hat to cover her scaled face (same, diva)

but Yasmin just ran out of time to get it all done in and my GOD if she isn’t lucky to have that Transformation Challenge win under her belt.

An Unofficial Definitely Not A Halloween Costume Ranking:
1. Baby Button-Eyes in The Re-Re-Deadening
2. The Legally Distinct Family of Blood
3. The Definitely Not Evil Demon Worshipper
4. WET ELF
5. La Diab-Less Good Than Everyone Else

In what I am not sure is a genuine occurence or just a desire to reference the double killer twist in Scream, we had a pair of Garments of the Week with Kit and Orla sharing the prize

and nothing in this world is funnier to me than the limp doll head just squashed onto the head of the mannequin

when I say “I’m one of the Dolls” this is what I mean.

It came down to a decision as to whether to boot Gaynor or Yasmin. I genuinely felt like they were gearing up to eliminating Yasmin, and it certainly wouldn’t have been the most unwarranted decision in the world – she did fail to complete the final challenge. They have also eliminated the winner of the Transformation Challenge several times before. However, time finally caught up to Gaynor

and she will enjoy going back to her sewing room and never having to think about a high concept made to measure challenge ever again. A POX ON YOU, PATRICK!

And so, our semi-finalists go on to 1920s week – please keep your hands in the TARDIS at all times and ignore the signs on the pub doors.