Please remember to cut ALL of the rings of your 6 pack holder.

Justice for brown leather, apparently!

Hell For Pleather

This week’s theme was Wardrobe Staples which is a little bit of a They-Told-Us-Ethical-Kink-Week-Is-a-Firm-No-So-Here of theme. And certainly allows them to use all that vegan leather they’d shipped in so we pivot from environmentally conscious gimpery, to environmentally conscious rock and roll with the pattern challenge being a very cool looking leather jacket

and for, I believe, the first time outside of some Transformation Challenge nonsense involving suspiciously easy to clean bedding, the sewers were working with leather. However, much like that time on Project Runway where Margarita tried to buy $250 worth of real rabbit fur before Tim Gunn stopped her at the register and threatened to shoot her in the face with a bazooka if she so much as exchanged a dime, Sewing Bee is a show free of real leather and fur

and because vegan leather is very expensive, they were categorically not allowing the sewers to cut out their own pieces – they’d been given everything they needed, trims and all pre-cut and measured

I was somewhat hoping that they’d all start trading pieces of their jackets away like friendship bracelets to create four of the most hideously Frankenstein’d looking jackets imaginable but sadly everyone kept entirely within their pre-ordained colour spectrums. Whimsy is dead. The most customisation the sewers got was their selection of fabric for their pocket bags so I can’t blame three of the four of them for letting them be seen

let your freak pocket bags fly!

Most of the leathers were the expected colours for a leather jacket – black, red, brown and even white had a certain glam rock flair to it before it got co-opted by every wife of a mega church preacher

the one outlier was the sort of alien green option

Initially Anna had made a bee-line for it having beaten Beth – however, she’s reformed in her fabric spiking ways and very graciously conceded the green to Beth as she went for the red instead

I did wonder why there were 5 options and went down a mental rabbit hole as I tried to remember if there had been a contestant who had suddenly dropped out due to illness

but once Beth had got that green leather she wasn’t letting it go for love, money nor an Avalanche! In The Haberdashery

you’d have to prize it out of her cold, dead hands! In the end she was kind of the runaway winner of this challenge, a fact that had almost been predetermined the moment that Patrick found out that she was the only one that had read all of the instructions before sewing with the very expensive fabric

but she had also sewn it absolutely immaculately

it’s a VERY good jacket – like a vintage Winchester chair that doesn’t want you to talk to it at the bar.

All of the sewer’s jackets looked very wearable – they only had very minor mistakes like Anna having two different hem depths

but I think you’d get away with wearing it in public and only the most petty person ever pointing it out to you

I bought a suede jacket last year when Sainsbury’s finally realised that what women want is to dress like loosely themed Halloween cowboys only to get it home and realise that one of the cuffs didn’t have buttonholes cut into it. I’m still mad that I paid full price for it. Anyway, only woman has ever pointed out that one of my sleeves was unbuttoned. IT’S A FEATURE, PATRICIA.

The only shade of leather that went completely unloved was the brown as Heather ran for the classic black like Rebecca whenever she was within 50 feet of a bolt of pink fabric

and Emma was happy to face the tough choice of picking between Brown and Literally Anything Else

the only problem that Emma really faced with the white leather was that it made the tiny sliver of visible pocket gingham that much more noticeable but aside from that it was very well well sewn, which was the same for Heather’s black leather jacket

and because hers and Emma’s greatest sins were marginally visible interior pockets, it did mean that it was Anna missing out on one of the podium positions. I’m still pretty confident Anna is probably winning the whole series but I appreciate the vulnerability.

An Official Vegan Leather Jacket Ranking:
1. Couching Leather, Hidden Pocket Bags
2. Emma’s Angelic Hell’s Angel
3. Heather’s Classique Option
4. Seeing Red (pocket bags)

Down and Shirty

For their Transformation Challenge, the sewers were having to take the wardrobe staple, men’s shirts, and make them into that wardrobe item you promise yourself will be useful in the future and end up never wearing ever again: the wedding guest dress. It’s not my fault that not enough people are inviting me to quaint springtime picnics! (also, don’t invite me to picnics, I will not come because I don’t believe in eating food outside xoxo)

I don’t entirely know why they’d chosen wedding guests as the theme for this challenge because the fabrics were all very mute corporate tones with the occasional dress-down Friday option thrown in for Emma specifically

so I can’t even really hold it against the sewers that the final result is a bit like the four horsewomen of the Middle Earth Apocalypse just rocked up to catch the bouquet

if you wore any of these to *my* wedding I’d have you sectioned before I so much as even thought the words “I do”! But removed from the concept of having to attend a wedding and supplanted instead into peeling an unfathomably large amount of potatoes in the the laird’s basement? Sure!

probably the biggest struggle in this whole challenge was finding a selection of shirts that at least somewhat toned in together and decide that the theme of the wedding you were going to was apparently fairy tale characters through the lens of Mugatu’s Derelicte collection

I like that it’s a very different aesthetic for Heather, there’s a chaos and edge to it that I haven’t seen a lot from her. Unfortunately the judges are in Minor Detail Pickiness Mode and decided that the big swatch of blue at the front of the skirt was unsightly

I personally think the bigger issue here is that your crotch looks like it is actively trying to chew its way out of the skirt, but sure! Apparently it was to make dancing easier

Emma however had decided that tonal cohesion was for cowards and decided to reanimate the dead corpse of the Oxford Street Tie Rack as her wedding date

the judges were quite into it, but also apparently determined to hit Emma with as many steel chairs as possible

DIVA DOWN!

Emma wasn’t the only one catching strays as the sewers all proclaimed how ugly the shirts they had been given looked while making direct eye contact with the exact outfit that Anna was currently wearing <3

there was a very real risk of the sewing room descending into a man hunt if they didn’t bring out some shirts that didn’t look like Baby’s First Job Interview 3-pack From TK Maxx

Beth had hoped that the darker colours would be less offensive than some of the others

a statement made while holding a shirt that would only be worn by a Finance Bro With A Steroid Dependency

sadly she did not end up using that particular shirt and instead mostly made do with a single corduroy shirt and more of the braiding technique that seems to have been particularly popular this year

I’m not sure she’s a guest at this wedding so much as a contract killer set to assassinate the groom when he turns around at the alter. The judges did not really vibe with it because they felt that it looked too much like a shirt still. I think the bigger issue is that the skirt just lacks any sort of fashionable direction, I think Beth knew she wanted to make a racer cut dress but didn’t entirely know how to then make that ~weddingy~? Again, I do not know why that was the theme – perhaps I should forgive the Grown Up Matilda Headcanon Transformation Challenge because this one might have been even more of a cul-de-sac of broken ideas.

An Official Wedding Guest Outfit Ranking:
1. The Scullery (brides)Maid
2. Pattern Clashing Spiderman Meme
3. Derelicte Bo Peep
4. You’re About To Be The Ex-husband

Where Will You LBD?

For their penultimate Made to Measure the sewers were having to make Little Black Dresses – a challenge they can only really do at this stage of the competition because MY GOD, can you imagine if we had to watch 12 little black dresses walk this catwalk? But at this stage you can at least guarantee some variety and I was really pleased with how varied the results were! There were the obvious reference points with the sewers being slipped £5 to mention the Revenge Dress and Coco Chanel – another year of Amber Butchart noticeably doing not doing the brief Coco Chanel History Bit™ but she will gleefully show you her entire PowerPoint presentation of hotties in leather

as much as I love being educated about the origins of houndstooth or how eating denim saved Captain Cook’s entire crew from scurvy (a completely true fact, Google AI Overview!), my favourite version of Amber Butchart is when she just shows up with the posters that adorned her bedroom walls as a teenager.

I was also going to question if everyone does actually own a Little Black Dress and then remembered that I do actually have one that I specifically bought for a funeral and proved that you can take the femme boy out of the maid café but you’ll never take the maid café out of the cracked egg

I can accept now that it actually was insane of me to wear what is exceptionally obviously a moderately high end hotel’s maid outfit to a funeral but in my defence, I was on the waiting list for Dialectical Behaviour Therapy at the time – I literally took a phone call to book my first appointment during the wake with a cocktail in my hand, I have never felt more Carrie Bradshaw in my life.
Heather was the one invoking The Revenge Dress for her LBD

but she wasn’t going for a direct copy, or even a vague reminiscence, it was more a ~vibe~

and that vibe being the potential to cause international opprobrium if you wore it after your husband admitted being a cheat

I actually really like this dress, I think it’s very sexy in a restrained and effortlessly cool kind of way. I was SO GLAD that Anna talked Heather into removing the diamante straps that cheapened it tremendously

that’s a girl’s girl right there!
The judges had a few issues with the dress, Patrick wanted the skirt to be really tight and pencil-cut

and he’s VERY wrong for that, it comes across as a very ~man’s idea~ of being sexy, I think the looser, flowier cut is much more seductive in its casualness. I do agree that she should’ve kept the lace and nude layers separate to lean even more into that though. They could’ve left the critique there and I’d have been fine but then Patrick mentioned the millimetre long strands of fabric where the nixed straps had been and it made me want to go scream at the moon

something about it felt very petty and like a bigger deal was being made of it than actually needed to be for the sake of it being the semi-final and to show how exacting the standards were.

Emma was a little adrift for this challenge because I don’t think she’s ever made anything in her life that wasn’t some shade of purple and Hell if she was going to start now as she found the chromatically iridescent cheat code

and to be fair to her, that fabric does look VERY cool when you wear it, if ever so slightly bin linery

but we’re how many series in of Tara being a model on this show and if it’s taught us anything, it’s that she would look good in a bin liner. With the drape and fit, it reminds me a lot of the Sinead Gorey thermographic heat image dresses that have had a real moment over the last few years

and for having to make a Little Black Dress that also aligned with their own senses of style, I think Emma did a really great job here. Beth was also feeling a little bit adrift in this challenge, not really being a big fan of dresses in general and setting off on a mission to make a pair of formal shorts

and she was going all out for it, having bought in a boucle tweed from Linton that Patrick could smell from up to 10 miles away

her inspiration was Chanel – and very specifically that period of time where Kristen Stewart was their biggest brand ambassador and they sent her all over the place looking like the outside setter and CEO of a wealth management agency’s volleyball team

this era of Kristen Stewart lives rent free in my head. Beth wasn’t quite going to the length of bouclé tweed booty shorts, hers were more of a jorts ~but fancy~ length

I am torn in twain by this outfit – I love the shorts and the sweetheart base top, I just don’t think I love the sheer overlay because it gets a little hairdresser smock. But also the show did a terrible job of actually showing us the outfit in full, the only full body shot we see of it is the above screenshot, everything else is a slow upward pan or mid shots that cuts the shorts off, defeating the entire point of Beth having made shorts

there is more time dedicated to her model mugging to camera for the Gods than there is actual attention paid to the outfit (and who could blame them truly? Makeup and hair killed this, so good for her)

I do perhaps wish there was a little more contrast in Beth’s outfit like a piping detail because the overlay kind of ate up the texture of the bouclé tweed. As Anna observed, it’s very easy for an all black outfit to read as quite flat, an issue that is even more so on camera, she was hoping to get around this by draping velvet over a very structural globe skirt

the big issue for the judges was that the boning of the skirt was still quite visible through the velvet but I think it’s still rather fab and I’m obsessed with her model absolutely STOMPING in it like all she needed from Big Tesco was a loaf of bread and the will to live

and I think that’s the perfect time to deploy intimidating levels of glamour.

An Unofficial Little Black Dress Ranking:
1. Emma’s LNQSBD
2. Short Changed
3. Your Ass Is Meant To Look Big In It
4. Heather’s Little Black Negligee

Personally, I think Emma’s was my favourite LBD but I think for having taken the bigger swing and risk, Beth didn’t not deserve to get the win

As for the elimination, I came into it assuming it was mostly a fight between Heather and Emma for the third spot in the final and once Emma had got ahead in both the pattern and transformation challenges it was pretty clear Heather was probably going to go this week

But she’s had a great and I think at times rather unsung run on the show – the bird print dress in the first Made to Measure is still one of my favourite garments of the series.