| FILMING | 6th/7th October 2019 |
| AIR DATE | 17th June 2020 |
| CHALLENGE | Made to Measure – Flapper Dress |
| PATTERN USED | 1920’s Flapper dress pattern |
| MATERIALS USED | Under dress fabric – Navy Blue Crepe Satin Dress – Silver Floral Embroidered and Sequin Fabric |
| TIME ALLOWED | 5.5 Hours |
“I think the fit is pretty good, its easy over the hip” – Esme
This week, I had a different model, Rosie, who was Mark’s model in previous weeks. I had a bit of a nightmare getting the fabric for this challenge. It had been ordered from New York and it still hadn’t arrived by day one of filming. The sewing team said that they would go and find an alternative fabric for me to use if the one that was ordered didn’t turn up. This made me panic, I had practised with the one on order, if I got a new fabric now i’ve no idea how well it would work or look. The sewing team came back from their search of London fabric shops with three or four alternatives. I chose one as standby, praying that my original fabric would arrive. My prayers were answered the next day, on the morning of the made to measure, the fabric arrived. Phew!
My flapper dress was fairly simple in design and was based on a vintage pattern. I chose a navy blue underdress because I read somewhere that it made the dress show up better on camera than black. I don’t know if this is true, it didn’t make it look worse!
I tried to remove the sequins in the seam allowance, but the fabric they were attached to was tearing and it would take hours to remove them all. So I took the risk and left them in and just hand press them flat. I didn’t think it looked too bad, but I guess that was part of the challenge, to use sequin fabrics and not to have bulky seams!
“The bulky seam is killing the shape of it” – Patrick
I can’t believe that I didn’t notice that the underdress was showing slightly and it was about a centimetre too long, this could have been easily fixed by adjusting the hem or even just adjusting the straps.
Esme quickly pointed out that the binding on the V at the front wasn’t very secure and as this is a stress point this could easily tear. The judges were pretty tough on us this week, well, it was the semi-final after all. It was sad to see Liz go, we had had so many laughs together whilst filming.
It felt unreal that I had got to the final, I never expected to get that far, I had only been sewing for about four years. I had watched the show and admired all the previous Bees. I never expected that it would be me in the final. I wasn’t bothered about winning now, it would be nice, but to get to the final was a great achievement, and I was just going to do my best. I also couldn’t wait to make the dress that I had designed for Greg aka Miss Martini.
