🐝 The Great British Sewing Bee 🐝

Looking forward to it.

Woohoo!! 🪡🧵

Ooh great. Looking forward to it.

I'm really looking forward to it. I thought it must be imminent when bbc1 were showing last year's series every day recently. It's quite daft how much of a fan o am, because I can't sew to save myself!

Thank you Millie for letting us know that The Sewing Bee is back soon!

I used to like this programme and adore Patrick but now it has become an exercise in inclusive box ticking rather than taking people on their sewing skills.

A friend of mine got through to the final stages at interview but was then not chosen and her family said it was because she was too “ordinary”.

Thank you Millie22 I would have missed this if you hadn’t)t posted. I love this series and I don’t care how ‘inclusive’ this programme is. As a bit of a sewer myself I am always awestruck by the skills the contestants show, and just wish I was half as good. It never fails to inspire me to raid my fabric stash and get stitching. Just a shame that there is nowhere local to me that sells fabric these days so it all has to be bought online, not always with a successful outcome.

Good-oh. I am always in admiration of their creative imagination. I wouldn’t know where to start without a pattern.

I appreciate your use of emojis in a heading Millie, a woman after my own heart ♥️

Can't wait I have to admit to not been able to see a button on but I love the show and adore Patrick

Fanny
I quite like them!! 😊

Primrose - Maybe your friend didn't have much to say for herself and was a bit quiet. If you watch it you will realise that the sewers have to have a bit of personality as well as sewing talent.

Primrose53

I used to like this programme and adore Patrick but now it has become an exercise in inclusive box ticking rather than taking people on their sewing skills.

A friend of mine got through to the final stages at interview but was then not chosen and her family said it was because she was too “ordinary”.

I'm sorry to say that I think you're right re the box-ticking, Primrose53

It's also happening with Strictly.

I'm hopeless at sewing, but I love this show. I will certainly be watching .

Yippee!

Great! Am looking forward to this. How they do what they do within such tight time limits I do not know.

Excellent!
Although I don’t sew myself, other than replacing buttons or fixing hems, I follow Gill and Debra from the previous series on Instagram as I really “took” to both of them. Debra has started a “Sewing with Style” school, classes are held in person and on-line.

DanniRae

Primrose - Maybe your friend didn't have much to say for herself and was a bit quiet. If you watch it you will realise that the sewers have to have a bit of personality as well as sewing talent.

She is bright and vivacious, a chatterbox, works in the medical profession, wife, mother and passed a phone interview which lasted nearly an hour and involved some very difficult questions about various sewing techniques. She also passed a screen test.

Sadly, many of those chosen now are selected for their piercings, purple hair, ethnicity or whatever they identify as. Not for any sewing skills. I am a very basic sewer but when they are given instructions to make something and they do not even recognise simple terms then you know why they were chosen.

The purpose of Sewing Bee is not to showcase the best sewers in the country, it is to provide entertainment by setting excellent sewers who also have strong personalities and diverse backgrounds into a group to perform sewing tasks and work out who is best.

When the show started they went for the best sewers and what happened was they ended with better and better sewers, so had to set more and more difficult tasks, so the sewers were so busy doing intricate things that they didn't interact with either the presenter or each other, and it got dull. That is why they had a break and came back, with excellent sewers chosen for their balance within the group and changed the female presenter, May Martin, who was a stickler for sewing quality and replaced her with Esme Young, whose focus is more on style and fashion.

TV's first purpose is to entertain and attract viewer ratings so that they can attract advertisers and chaarge good rates for advertising so programmes will be tweaked to make them more viewable and any purist on any subject needs to understand that.

Paint drying.

Thankyou Millie22, I shall be watching.

Me too, I love it. I don’t remember the contestants being particularly “out there”. I do like the way they always bond and support each other, outwardly at least!.

DS1 once got it into her head that she’d like us to pair up for The Million Pound Drop. She’d worked out that they liked one ditzy, outgoing contestant paired with a dull and cautious one, so I was instructed to fill in the application as Madge to her Dame Edna. We didn’t get through - I think I probably went too far along the boring scale. .

DD and I were on The Great Antiques Hunt back in the early 90s. It wasn't a particularly pleasant experience. We were put up at a nice hotel, and the food was good, but otherwise we were just ignored by everyone, only one of the experts actually chatted to us, we were treated like props to be moved about the set, to do our bit, but otherwise kept in a metaphorical cupboard.

I wasn't expecting to be going out and socialisng with them, but the occasional acknowledgment that we and the other couple were there would have been nice.

As I said one expert was nice, he chatted to us as we were waiting while they were setting up the test we had to do involving him and said a few words to us after the test had been complete. The rest ignored us.

Sewing Bee is on BBC so doesn’t have to attract advertisers, unlike ITV and others.

I wasn’t keen on the presenter of the last series, forgotten her name, didn’t think Claudia Winkleman was a great choice either. I preferred Joe Lycett.