Me when I walk into the kitchen and someone’s doing the washing up.

My favourite piece of British literature is local bus stop graffiti.

Sew-lock Holmes

There was a lot of discussing of what on earth they could possibly be doing for a literary inspired Pattern Challenge – or at least which beloved psychopomp they could be making a jacket for

Rebecca however was completely convinced that it’d be a deerstalker for Sherlock Holmes

I guess it was too much for me to hope that it’d be that chapter from Moby Dick about using the whale’s foreskin to make an apron, huh?

unfortunately for Rebecca there was no Detective Barbie Tweed in the sewing room and as the resident halfling in this D&D party of a quarter-final she stood NO CHANCE in the dash for the green hunter’s tweed on the top shelf

Rebecca is the Halfling Artificer, Beth is the Wood-elf Ranger, Emma is the Air Genasi Bard, Heather is the High-elf Sorcerer and Anna is the Drow Warlock. This entire sentence would kill whichever Victorian waif wore Heather’s deerstalker that was leaning a little more Little Tim than Sherlock Holmes

it wasn’t Heather’s greatest showing in a Pattern Challenge but I think it did turn out better than anticipated after Patrick crawled out of the well to shame her pattern cutting

sir, are you ok?

the main issue did end up being the aligning of all the flaps

which was pretty much a problem across the board for everyone except Beth who was very much playing the role of main character this week

it was a beautifully made hat and the colour choices were very classic and made to appeal to Patrick who looked absolutely aghast to find out there are people in this world who have never touched tweed

I would be more shocked if Emma said she had made something fitting for a Barbour jacket wearer. He was however willing to forgive her because he LOVED her fabric choice – you’ve never seen a man so engrossed by slubs in all your life!

but lovely slubs, beautiful slubs can only only get you so far with Emma just being beaten to the top spot by Beth. Heather landed in fourth, beating Anna who’d accidentally been suckered in by a slightly looser tweed that had stretched making it too big for the decapitated display head

I’m sure Sophie could still make the baggy tweed skullcap work

we’re coming dangerously close to inventing Patrick’s alter ego: MC Paddy-G.

There were quite a few faults with Anna’s hat beyond the gapping of the flaps and peak and I don’t blame her for looking as though she was disassociating while the judges reeled them off

the face of a woman astral projecting herself to 1800s Derbyshire to scream on the moors. Meanwhile Heather looked at her hat with a face of revulsion only reserved for that woman whose husband ran off with the rotisserie chicken

why do they keep rejecting my script for Chicken Run 3: The Cluck Chair?

Given that she had been bested by Beth’s ape index, Rebecca was forgoing the traditional and had decided to use yellow tweed, FOR HER AND NOT YOU, SHERLOCK

and it was a pretty good hat in the end

like many of the others, there were was some gapping and issues with flaps lining up but I’ve had enough of the flap shaming.

An Official Deerstalker Hat Ranking:
1. The Longer Arm of the Law
2. Slublock Holmes
3. She/Herlock Holmes
4. Heather’s Crimesolving Waif
5. Anna’s Fear-stalker

What’s The Matilda With You?

Literary Icons Week is another of the harder themes to shove a Transformation Challenge into so they were getting a little abstract with it and making the quarterfinalists run through a minefield of a challenge by transforming school uniforms into outfits that their headcanon for grown-up Matilda would wear

the very careful wording not to say “adult Matilda” lest this all go a little bit Fresher’s Week at Pop World.

So the sewers were being encouraged to envision what THEY thought Matilda would be up to in her adulthood. Except Esme had already decided she’d be the leader of the post-apocalyptic punk rebellion so if you didn’t engage in raggedy tartan nonsense, I’m afraid you were wrong

and unfortunately Rebecca is allergic to Raggedy Tartan Nonsense

and I’m not sure I do think that Matilda is punk – she’s a lo-fi beats and Stardew Valley until the wee hours of the morning girlie. The most rebellious thing she might be is download the toxic yuri Abigail mod and because of that I think Rebecca’s was the most Matilda

the judges however were NOT feeling it and thought it far too reserved for the imaginary future of this children’s book character (again, A MINEFIELD)

if by “convent” you mean moved to Japan to open a cat café that also moonlights as a children’s english school, then SURE, Matilda went to a convent. I also quite liked Emma’s – I thought the lattice-work top was very ambitious, I don’t know how neat and appealing it ended up looking on the mannequin though

and I’d love to hear more about how Matilda ended up as a winklepicker on a remote island in the south Pacific

but of course marooned islander with a mysterious and troubled past is not punk so it’s the bottom two for you and the member of the sundress nunnery! I’m complaining a lot about the punk of it all but I did really, REALLY like Anna’s outfit who had really lucked out on the fabrics

I just think, and this is no real fault of Anna’s, we’ve reached saturation point on the artfully pinned and draped dresses in the Transformation Challenge. It’s catnip for Esme and it does look cool so I get the appeal of going that route and the show wanting to lean in, but maybe the Transformation Challenge needs a retool. I’d like to see more non-clothing items? The stuffed toys were such a refreshing change of pace and they all still knocked it out the park and gave us incredible television – I haven’t stopped thinking about Beth’s off-brand Taiwanese flea market Labubu for three weeks

he haunts me and I love it. I don’t really know what else they could do to be honest and maybe it’s not that big an issue for the people who aren’t running out of ways to describe the 30th vaguely Vivienne Westwood inspired asymmetrical dress

won’t somebody please think of the owner of a niche interest blog!?

The other one I really liked was Heather’s because I enjoyed the storytelling element of having the red bows round the outfit as a reference to the one Matilda as a child wore

I personally would’ve put her in second place over Beth’s that looks a little bit like someone has suffered a tragic lampshade accident

I do enjoy the slight nod to a dark academia aesthetic that the pleated capelet and her rapid onset obsession with burgundy gives, if anything that’s more Matilda than punk to me? What we can gather is that this is probably a very subjective challenge and everyone had a very different ranking of what Matilda grew up to be – librarian, HBC cafe barista, iguana-handler at a regional butterfly house, smut peddling Wattpad exile. We are all agreed that she was definitely gay, right? That’s non-negotiable.

An Official Grown Up Matilda Outfit Ranking:
1. Canonically Accurate Punk Matilda, APPARENTLY
2. Matilda’s Tragic Lampshade Accident
3. Bowing Out
4. Castaway Matilda
5. Matilda at the Backless Sundress Nunnery

Sewing Janes

Congratulations to The Great British Sewing Bee, I think you are maybe the only show that could ever have got through a whole episode themed around British literature without once mentioning The Bigotry Wizard – what was his name again?

as we end Literary Icons Week not with creating your own Rowlingsona with an overly specific name (I have to imagine mine would be Amanda Timson) but instead with a Jane Austen themed challenge to make up for Anna’s Sherlockian Ordeal. All they had to do was create a regency outfit for a Jane Austen heroine but also inject some of their own personality into it

but not too much personality

I’m sorry Patrick, what did you expect from Emma who dresses a bit like she’s an exotic bird? (entirely complimentary.) The fabrics were very Featherington posse pulling up to whichever formal event the episode called for, which is a bit of a risk to take because the whole joke there was that they looked a bit like a salad jelly from 1955

and I don’t know if Emma had quite prepared for how much the show would end up treating “Bridgerton” as a bit of a dirty word – I get the distinct feeling that The BBC is perpetually mad that they didn’t get to commission it and have never really found footing within the gleefully historically inaccurate period drama space. My personal favourite is The Forsytes on Channel 5 where the men all have TikTok fuck boy hair and everyone looks like they have a 250 day streak on Duolingo

and when it came to styling Emma’s model for the runway, the makeup team really had no choice but to fully lean into the Bridgerton of it all – and they absolutely killed it

her model looks so good here – I’d happily say even potentially the best anyone has looked on the Sewing Bee runway, it’s A LOT of look and she carries it off with aplomb. The problem is when she turns around and you never really want someone to say “the gape at the back is a bit off-putting”

my favourite was when Esme went for a closer look and then looked at Emma like she’d just… I don’t know, eaten cold regency soup with the wrong spoon

before they treat the whole thing to a full on horror crash-zoom as Esme has a full search of this empire waisted canyon

and in any other world this would’ve meant that Emma was about to be dropped through the historically accurate trapdoor because it is kind of rendering the dress completely unwearable unless you just slide along the wall all night like a regency period gecko. But she wasn’t the only gaper in the room – a phrase only mildly more off-putting than “lenticular slits”

Lenticular Slits’s Shepherd’s Bush concert in 1989 was amazing!

Rebecca had been quite ambitious with her design – choosing to make both a dress and a really quite complicated spencer jacket with a double collar and white contrast piping

something about it reads a little more Larkrise to Candleford than Jane Austen to me – I think it’s ultimately because it looks a little less fashionable and more costume than some of the others – except Anna who had cranked the Halloween of it all up to an earth shattering 11. The judges however loved Rebecca’s choices of fabrics, the block print cotton was a nice period-appropriate touch

but there were a few technical issues with the jacket – the gape in the front and the collars not quite meeting, which did end up drawing the eye quite a bit

but she’d handled the piping details and the drape of the sleeves really well.

Anna’s jacket was also not without some fault – in the dying minutes of the challenge she’d accidentally sewn one of the jacket’s mesh skirts on backwards and was despairing to whichever gothic horror God would listen to her

and her only choice to make them even vaguely symmetrical was to hack away at them

which did leave them looking very ragged and lopsided

the rest of the outfit is phenomenal – her inspiration was Northanger Abbey by way of Tim Burton which sure, that’s some wonderful Netflix word soup. She clearly thought the judges were going to DRAG her for the jacket’s skirt being a hack job the regency period hasn’t seen since Carrie Cracknell went at Persuasion with all the deftness of a line cook making an omelette as she sat watching it walk the runway once again thinking about screaming on the moors

but the judges were VERY forgiving of it all on account of the Gothic Wrist Hankies being a perfect cover for it

and I won’t pretend that Anna deserved to be eliminated for this outfit – the top jacket is a feat of craftsmanship given the time constraints and pressure of the whole situation but I think it came across a little too much as glossing over what was actually quite a glaring problem with the outfit.

Both Beth and heather had probably gone for the most classically Austen dresses – or at least the ones that someone in 1802 could wear and not have everyone look at them like they needed to be taken to the doctor for a case of Rapid Onset Female Madness. Beth however had a gimmick in that she was repurposing her mother’s wedding skirt for the challenge

and oh my God, she absolutely killed it

it’s just really pretty. I was concerned what the gathered and twisted trim would look a little bit bulky but it adds a really pretty softness to the dress

I’m just so happy for her that it worked out so phenomenally.

Heather’s was a little simpler but I do like that it almost looks like the dress that the little sister to Beth’s would wear

like Emma, she’d had the added complication of a lace overlay. But unlike Emma, hers wasn’t a risk of historically inaccurate regency butt cleavage when her model turned around – there was just a slightly bouncy seam

god forbid Elizabeth Bennet wants to throw it back at the Meryton Ball.

An Unofficial Jane Austen Inspired Outfit Ranking:
1. Beth’s Wedding Belle
2. Heather’s Twerkable Bennet Sister
3. Deus ex Gothic Wrist Hankie
4. Rebecca’s Emma (Not That One)
5. Emma’s Scandalous Regency Butt Cleavage

They’ve been edging Beth for a win since like week one so I’m glad she came out swinging with such an undeniable win this week, she really did knock that Made to Measure out of the park

the elimination was a little harder and I imagine would be slightly controversial no matter which way they cut it. I did think Emma was a goner just because her mistake in the Made to Measure felt a little more like it made the dress slightly unwearable and given her reaction to the elimination I think she’d fully prepared herself to say goodbye

but that wasn’t going to be the case as the judges decided it was time up for Rebecca this week. It was a heart-breaking elimination to watch – she was clearly devastated and I don’t like screenshotting people when they’re that upset so have this one instead

Shine on, you crazy business hobbit!