We’re turning the Team Challenges off IMMEDIATELY.

What *do* men like?

Just a quick note as to why this is later than I would like:
Unfortunately during the week my laptop fritzed and is currently (hopefully) on the mend – I thought we’d fixed the problem on Saturday but it doesn’t seem to have solved the issue. So for the time being I am on a borrowed laptop, which is fine and I can cope with as I sort everything else out. Hopefully things going forward should be a little more prompt. Celebrity MasterChef starts on Tuesday, so I’m a bit panicked!

Junk In The Trunks

Kicking off my personal World Cup was the Pattern Challenge which saw the sewers having to create a pair of distinctly unsexy men’s swimming trunks, which they quickly realised and decided to fix in post with Amber Butchart’s Powerpoint Presentation of Slutty, Slutty Little Shorts

the only erotic charge anyone was getting this entire challenge was Beth having to go smoke a cigarette after inserting an eyelet

and whatever is happening here

and having learned from Sports Week over on Tom Daley’s Knitted Island Prison, Patrick’s knobbly knees were not going to be poking out the bottom of them anytime soon

I am simply never not thinking about poor Yasmin Harper having to stand there as she silently vowed vengeance upon that knitting twunk she once called a friend – YOU’LL ROT FOR THIS, DALEY! It is kind of a shame though because I would pay cash money to see Patrick modelling Rebecca’s best guess at what men like

and to be fair, her hypothesis is pretty spot on! I met a friend for coffee the other day and the first thing he told me about was triceratops. But in saying that I did begin to “umm, actually” Patrick about the misinformation that Jurassic Park (surprisingly not a documentary or particularly dedicated to dinosaur accuracy) has spread about dilophosaurs

but I think dinosaurs are a gender sprectrum – T-rex? A sensible boy dinosaur for all occasions, velociraptors are for the girls, as are plesiosaurs

and then ankylosaurus are they/them nonbinary icons

I know at least 4 baristas who look exactly like this and all of them make the best oat milk lattes you’ll ever have. I am available for more dinosaur gender discourse, DM for commissions.

Given that the trunks were clearly a surf shirt cut, I was surprised by how many of the sewers went for a completely neutral block colour, this challenge is tailor made for whacky prints, like Beth and her very scary sunglass wearing sharks

the song Baby Shark is to Beth as anything more saturated than a raw umber was to Lewis – but ultimately confronting her galeophobia paid off because she rocketed to second place

being placed just behind Heather who had lured Patrick in with a sensible olive pair that he could still wear his beach-going blazer with

Patrick, stop hiding your roller-disco days under a bushel of tweed!

EMBRACE WHITE MAN REGGAE PALEANTOLOGY!

and also in the block colour gang was Anna with her terracotta pair that Patrick nit-picked over a minor wobble in the seams and sent her straight to 5th place without collecting £200 if you’re wondering what stage of the competition we’re at

*Minnie looks directly to camera* “COMPETITION?!”

Tamar, have you ever watched the show?

she’d really struggled with the elastic and attaching the mesh, which a lot of the sewers had some issues with in one way or another, most commonly measurement issues – what if men just want extra netting? WHAT THEN?

Minnie was spared last place on account of Adele having many of the same problems and also struggling to comprehend the iron

twice

but as much trouble as the ironing industrial complex was giving her (stop doing it, it’s a con!) her actual shorts looked fine and I thought were really nice!

but there were just a few more measurement issues with hers than everyone else’s and unfortunately means I can’t use this moment of drive-by tempting of fate against Tim

and thus ends the the four week run of the Pattern Challenge being a mausoleum of men’s sewing endeavours as Tim beat out Minnie and Adele

the only real criticism against them was that he was too deep in the hem – the critiques were VERY picky about small details which I think shows how good everyone actually was in this challenge. I think it’s probably the most successful one thus far.

Lastly we have Emma and her public shaming pants

Thomas, for the love of God, your friends just want you to wear pants.

An Official Men’s Swimming Trunks Ranking:
1. The Closest Thing To Tweed Surf Shorts
2. Scary Shark (DOO DOOO DOOO DOO)
3. Boys Gone Wild (Swimming)
4. Men Do Be Loving Dinosaurs
5. A Slight Hem Wobble, Oh The Terror(cotta)
6. Doing It For The Boys
7. Minnie’s Not Competition Ready Board Shorts
8. Adele vs The Iron

Mixed Doubles

This week’s Transformation Challenge was something a bit new as it turns out they actually learned NOTHING from Tom Daley’s Crocheted Nightmare Shed and were going to turn your solo craft hobby into a team sport with the help of, as is tradition in fashion design competitions, The Tim Gunn Button Bag

the teams being:
Team Tidele

Team Rebenna

Team Hemma

and Just Meth

the sporting goods material of the season being windsurfing sails which they had to engineer into a two-piece outfit

said outfit could be a top and skirt or a top and a trousers (variety!)

I’m sure they were just making sure that galaxy-brained Emma in the corner didn’t work out that technically 2 legwarmers are two different pieces of an outfit. Most of the sewers opted for a top and skirt, which is to say they all looked like a single dress while Anna and Rebecca went about it with the slightly more difficult challenge of tailoring a pair of pants for their Pansexual Power Ranger

there’s something very 80s Barbie’s brief career as a mechanic about it that I kind of love, as well as Wallace’s Yassified Wrong Trousers for Pride Month

they are strong independent trousers!

Rebecca and Anna really excelled together and Anna can now safely put her high school team sports trauma behind her

my high school PE teacher learned very quickly to give up on me and the group of other kids in our PE class that would kind of just hang out on the sidelines and start making daisy chains. And of that group of 4 – three of us are now women and the other one just married his husband.

All the teams worked really well together – I think the closest we came to divorce court was when Heather said that the pink she and Emma was working with was very Mr. Blobby

I think it probably wasn’t helping that they were turning it into a pair of Mr. Blobby’s renaissance pantaloons

this did end up coming last, not because it was bad by any margin, I think it’s actually very good but someone has to be in fourth and they were treated to the bogus critiques of there not being enough of a through-line between the top and bottom. I think it’s fine – very Catherine Howard in a high school production of SIX

but it maybe isn’t the most ~inspired~ use of the fabric and colours. But it’s also not nearly as visually unparsable as Tim and Adele’s salsa on Week 2 of Strictly Come Dancing for a woman over 45 who will be going home that week

or “a pimped up traffic warden” in Adele’s own worlds

said traffic warden isn’t allowed to work within 2 miles of a school

the kinkification of The Great British Sewing Bee continues at a wonderfully leisurely pace. We’ll get Hardcore Sodomy Week eventually – discarded jock straps from Folsom Street Fair in the transformation challenge, pup masks in the pattern challenge, Esme walking around with a necklace of recycled poppers like that weird necklace of paint-filled hand sanitizer bottles and carabiners she had that one time

I will never stop thinking about this Hyrulean potion seller ass outfit (complimentary.)

Lastly we have Meth who had possibly the most “this is two pieces but not really” outfit of the bunch with their biblically accurate cocktail umbrella

the only thing that really prevented them from snagging the win was that Patrick and Esme felt that it still looked a bit too much like a windsurfing sail, which I can’t really argue too much against?

An Official Windsailing Dress Ranking:
1. The Pansexual Power Ranger
2. Meth’s Biblically Accurate Cocktail Umbrella
3. Tim and Adele’s Impenetrable Salsa Concept
4. Bootleg Catherine Howard

Bowling For Sew-p

The Made To Measure was back to a solo sport with the sewer having to design a bowling shirt that incorporated both applique and free-hand embroidery as well as illustrated a hobby they enjoyed doing. I imagine at one point it was probably a mandatory sport they enjoyed doing it and then Anna showed up with her artisanal olive oil and applique parsley and they said “fine, just do hobbies!”

most of the sewers did go for a sports theme – a few of them in the same vein as me insisting that birdwatching is a sport when I was 10 and didn’t want to play rugby because it was muddy and wet. The only time I ever had to play inter-school sport was the single time they, for some UNGODLY REASON, decided they needed to cobble together a D-team. A palpable sense of embarrassment from the sidelines as the parents and coaches watched a group of children who would’ve been better off serving half-time oranges try to play rugby. We did not get an acknowledgment during the following morning’s assembly and I never played inter-school sport again. Sometimes you just have to wear down the soul of a PE teacher and show them that your sport of choice is 4D chess.

Anna forwent sports in favour of making the uniform for a wonderfully hipster pizza joint in Shoreditch

she did maybe need marginally more spaghetti but her illustrative work on her applique pieces was extremely pleasing to the eye

and joining her in the “eww, sports” sin bin was Rebecca, I think? I’m not entirely sure what a Badger Patrol entails or is because the necessary mask is a little… Channel 4 Documentary About Countryside Dogging

but it is apparently an event from Camp Wildfire

and I did very much like the badger on the back and the artfulness of her pocket badger

however, Esme might need to go back to the Arasha Lalani School for Animal Fact Re-education

I’ve never been as floored as when she, with utter confidence, said that dogs weren’t mammals, they’re pets!

Animals were a popular theme and I don’t think any of them delighted me more than Heather’s slightly too enthusiastically fingered Turtle Pocket

you could’ve just popped a pen in there to demonstrate how a pocket worked but he went full two suspiciously short nails with it – good for you sir! Unfortunately for Heather, the back of the shirt didn’t pack quite as much of a charming punch as the front with the Dive Squad getting a little bit lost in the mix

but she wasn’t the only one, with Emma’s shirt being a little bit tight, thus bunching up parts of her Paragliding design on the back

but the front of the shirt was very Emma, with the bright and impactful lilac and blue combination

I personally think I loved Tim’s colour combination the most – there’s something very traditional and retro about his design choice with the pattern that I find utterly charming

unfortunately while choosing to make his sunray design on the back with pieces of his gym friend group’s old kits was a nice sentiment, his friends have a very lurid taste in sportswear which didn’t quite come together as well

and much like Heather, the central free-hand embroidering kind of gets overshadowed by the drag brunch happening around it. But I do have to applaud him for trying to free-embroider a hand, which you couldn’t pay me to attempt on national TV with a pencil and paper! But the stand-out piece of applique and embroidery for me was Beth’s portrait of her dog, Cilla

the fur texture she achieved is so cleverly done, it was just a shame there was a slight fit issue with the shirt.

Adele was taking the team shirt in a football-direction, as she made an ode to Blackburn Rovers and the time they won the league when she was 8

and I think the whole thing is really sweet – especially the very child-like drawings on the back

I think she perfectly captured the mood she was going for and I do hope she wears this to the pub with her dad as she wanted to.

Lastly we have Minnie who was going THROUGH IT in this challenge

the Made To Measure Challenges can be particularly hard, especially ones like this where the sewers are encouraged to be very emotionally attached to the subject matter. In Minnie’s case, she was making a shirt themed around her son who plays Ice Hockey

and it all started going wrong when she realised that the glue she was using wasn’t quite as dissolvable as she had thought it would be

and thus had to dedicate a good amount of the challenge desperately trying to remove the upsetting white glue crust bodging up the bottom third of the shirt

but despite her model competing in a solo wet t-shirt competition

there was a lot of very good design going on, the judges were particularly taken with her choice to write “Little Tempest” using a hockey boot lace

and saw the potential in the ideas behind the design.

An Unofficial Team Shirt Ranking:
1. Anna’s Schmucky Spaghetti Dinner
2. Do You Even Lift, Dawg?
3. The Erotic Mystery of A Badger Patrol
4. 7 Year Old Adele Is LIVING
5. Heather’s Turnt-le Pocket
6. Emma’s Paragliding By
7. Minnie’s Heated Gluery
8. Tim’s By A Bootlace

Garment of the Week was ultimately a decision as to whether they’d end up forgiving Beth for a slight fit issue or not, and as it turns out they would not, so it went to Anna

which I think was a very fair decision, even if her spaghetti portioning was disappointingly sparce and would still set you back £25 in London.
The elimination was also a close race with Tim and Minnie being on a pretty even level at the end of the episode. But the judges had responded more positively to Minnie’s ideas for her bowling shirt than they had to Tim’s, and so our last man standing falls in Week 5

I’m going to miss his dedication to putting male models in new and intriguing contraptions, most of all. And whose nails am I going to use to tell the passage of time between episodes, now!?

And so, The Lucky 7 move on to Kids Week where hopefully Esme has to play Tesco Meal Deal Charades again!