If you missed Monday’s live guest night at ThreadySetGo, pull up a chair (and maybe a parmo, more on that later) because this was one of the loveliest, funniest sessions we’ve ever run. We were joined by Izzy from IzzoSew Studio, and Great British Sewing Bee stars Stuart and Dan, who between them gave us heritage, heartbreak, hilarity, and one truly unforgettable Asda encounter.
You can watch the full replay over on ThreadySetGo now!
How it all began
We always like to start with origin stories, and this trio did not disappoint.
Izzy grew up in a tiny village in the foothills of the Himalayas, where her family’s clothes were made by local tailors rather than bought off a rail. She and her mum would pick fabric, sketch what they wanted, and take it to be made – so the idea of bespoke, made-for-you clothing was baked in from the start. Sewing runs even deeper than that, though: her great-grandparents were mill owners in Yorkshire, and her grandfather ran a tailoring business, travelling the world to source fabric. It skipped a generation with her parents, but clearly found its way back.
Stuart‘s story is a brilliant reminder that it’s never too late to start. After wanting to make himself a shirt for the best part of fifty years, lockdown finally gave him the nudge. He borrowed his mum’s machine, found a YouTube tutorial, and made his first shirt out of a bedsheet – French seams included. From there it snowballed into dresses for his wife, who’s a big fan of 1940s style, and a hobby that very much took over.
Dan‘s route in was completely different – and entirely hand-stitched. Working in corporate events and dance, he found himself turning up to gigs with nothing but a white shirt while everyone else had glamorous leotards. So he started altering charity shop finds and stitching costumes by hand, because he didn’t know how to use a sewing machine. He didn’t touch one properly until about eight years ago, when he inherited his auntie’s old industrial machine and decided to give it a go. The rest, as they say, is history.
From landscape architect to pattern designer
We dug a bit deeper into Izzy’s journey, because her background is genuinely fascinating. Before IzzoSew Studio, she was a fully qualified landscape architect, designing outdoor spaces for schools, prisons and hospitals. The link to pattern design turned out to be obvious once she said it out loud: both are about translating a two-dimensional design into a three-dimensional result. That trained eye for “if the fit isn’t right, why isn’t it, and how do we fix it?” carried straight over.
IzzoSew Studio launched five years ago, run alongside her husband Tim, who handles the admin, the graphics in their pattern booklets, and acts as a sounding board for her ideas. What started as a size-inclusive pattern range (sizes 6 to 34) grew into teaching, then retreats – they now run ten or eleven a year across Ascot, the Lake District and the Peak District – plus pattern-drafting workshops in Sheffield. Next month they’re launching the Online Studio focused entirely on fit, something she said their community has been asking for again and again: “I can sew, I know how to sew, but what I don’t know how to do is how to fit.”
Behind the curtain at the Bee
Naturally, we couldn’t have Stu and Dan on without asking about life on and around the Sewing Bee.
The audition process is a proper journey in itself: an initial video chat just to prove you’re “human and can hold a conversation,” followed by a round showing off your makes, a therapist check, and finally a live in-person audition lasting a few hours. Dan was candid that he knew his sewing wasn’t going to match the strongest contestants in the room, so he leaned on personality instead – and it clearly worked.
Both were reserves before getting the call to confirm a place, and both described the agony of staying quiet for months once they knew. Stuart even had a colleague apologise for assuming he’d been off work with an illness, when really he just couldn’t say a word about filming.
The friendship that outlasted the show
What came through most clearly was just how close Stu, Dan and their fellow contestant Caz remain. They bonded fast – Dan and Stu had opposite hotel rooms during filming, and Caz joined the friendship within the first couple of episodes after a joke that, by Dan’s own account, should have gone down terribly and instead had her in stitches (sewing pun fully intended).
That friendship turned into sewing socials, run a few times a year across the Northeast, the Midlands and the West Midlands, purely as an excuse for the three of them to see each other – and for fellow sewists to meet people who actually understand the horror of threading an overlocker. They now get recognised by superfans in branches of Asda, and once caused a full meltdown behind the till of a local fabric shop when eleven of them walked in unannounced.
Izzy has her own experience of running socials and retreats in Sheffield, the Lake District and Ascot, and made a point that landed with everyone in the room: sewing is a solitary hobby by nature, and these gatherings exist because we crave the connection of being around people who actually get it – whether that’s a roomful of strangers at a social, or twelve sewers thrown together under pressure on a TV set.
The hardest things they’ve ever made
Always a good question, and the answers ranged from technical to deeply personal:
- Stuart: the cover-stitch wrap dress in stretch fabric, made on the show – a fabric he’d never worked with before, on a machine he’d never used.
- Dan: a self-drafted men’s corset waistcoat for a fashion week show about adaptive clothing, which took eight attempts to get right – closely followed by a pleated denim jacket currently in progress for his fiancé, designed to flex with movement that has started with a sleeve pattern that took twelve hours.
- Izzy: tailored coats and beaded bridal gowns, less for technical difficulty and more for the sheer time and precision they demand.
Stuart also delivered the line of the night on cost: making your own clothes is never cheaper, but it is higher quality, better fitting, and longer-lasting – which is exactly how he justifies a £20-a-metre fabric habit.
If money (and physics) were no object
We finished, as always, with the dream sewing day question:
- Dan would go back to the very first day of filming the Bee, surrounded by the same eleven people, eating something “beige” – pasties and chips, no notes.
- Stuart wanted a Harris Tweed weavers’ tour in the Scottish Highlands, a secluded beach cabin, and a chef serving bacon, eggs and proper filtered coffee – followed swiftly by a request to simply repeat last year’s Sewing Bee reunion with a dozen friends and a phenomenal home-cooked spread.
- Izzy packed an entire week into one day: a 3am start, Pilates, a major design exhibition, fabric shopping, people-watching over lunch in a beautiful city, an evening of sewing, and cocktails over mountain or ocean views – “we’ll compress it into a day, shall we?”
We ended debating parmos, with Dan fully prepared to defend the Northeast’s honour over a giant breaded, bechamel-topped chicken breast at any hour of the day or night.
Huge thanks to Izzy, Stuart and Dan for such an open, funny, genuinely warm hour – and to everyone who joined live, chatted away in the background, and shared what you were working on as we went. This is exactly the kind of evening ThreadySetGo exists for: real conversation, just people who love this hobby talking honestly about it.
Keep an eye out for our next guest night announcement – and if you’re local to one of Stu, Dan and Caz’s socials, or fancy one of Izzy’s retreats, both come highly recommended by this room.
