| FILMING | 19th/20th September 2019 |
| AIR DATE | 29th May 2020 |
| CHALLENGE | Pattern Challenge – Men’s Bomber Jacket |
| TIME ALLOWED | 4.5 Hours |
| POSITION | 5th out of 7 |
Before the filming of this episode had even started, I was re-using someone else’s shirt! When I got ready for the show, the shirt I brought with me was too small, I had picked up the wrong one! The crew frantically searched for a shirt for me to wear. They had a couple that had not been used for a transformation challenge, but I wasn’t too keen on these. Instead I asked one of the crew members if I could borrow his shirt, and he could wear one of the transformation shirts. He agreed and so reduce, reuse, recycle week began!
The first challenge was to use women’s garments and make a bomber jacket. No new fabric was to be used, this was solely on re-using the old garments. Of course, it would be too easy if these were all XXL garments and we had plenty of fabric to cut out our pattern pieces. They weren’t, so we had to carefully select what part of the garment we would use for each pattern piece. I decided to not hide the fact that the fabric had a life before, so I cut out my pattern pieces to include some of the structural elements of the previous garment, leaving a zip in and a dart.
“I really love that you used existing parts of the garment” – Esme
This won praise from Esme and Patrick, so I was pleased with that decision. The zip went in ok, having never done an open ended zip before. Nor had I used ribbing, but that seemed to go in ok as well. The only issue were the zip tabs, they didn’t line up at the front, and it was blindingly obvious. Such a shame really, because I was happy with it otherwise. I could have been a little more daring with my original garments, but I just grabbed what I could and just went for it.
“It’s showing a really clever and well thought through use of the maximum amount of fabric” – Patrick
