What’s going on here? HP invited me to play along with the current season of Project Runway and sent me a TouchSmart computer to create my own designs. Along with creating designs I decided to write myself into the show. I am not doing well.

This week the challenge was to design a look that could be worn with Heidi’s sneaker design for New Balance. Everybody woke up to find running shoes, t-shirts and shorts and told to get themselves to a running track. This would be a team challenge (yikes) and the first three people to complete a lap would get to be team leader. Things got dramatic quickly in our fantasy Project Runway, once we got to the track Scott announced that he was going to voluntarily leave the competition*. He had been hired as a head designer by Dior and struggled with the decision to leave but ultimately decided leaving the show was the best move for his career. Later I snarkily told the cameras he would do anything to get out of having to exercise.

Here is my design:

Here is how I imagine this going down:

The design needed to incorporate suede so I ran around Mood trying to find the suede only to discover all the other designers had raided it. Oh no! I ended up only finding a tiny bit that hadn’t already been purchased. I also bought a bunch of sports mesh fabrics and some stretchy matte black something. I originally created a sort of dress using the sports mesh but as I was pinning in to my form I found it was hideously shiny. When Heidi and Tim came around to see the progress Heidi said “It looks awful, like it should be with the outfits from the pet store challenge.” Later in my workroom interview in front of the cameras I lamented “Heidi haaaaaates it!” I tossed all my mesh and was left with stretchy matte black stuff and stretchy but not too shiny red stuff, but not much of it. I spent too much time doing anything but sewing and later I would get one of those edits where the producers showed me fiddling with something and lots of cuts to other designers appearing to sideways-glance me. Luckily I didn’t get the lazy-person music along with it. I created short yoga pants with suede strips wrapping around at different places. The top I created looked like a cropped tent tank from the front and has a drape back with more suede as y-shaped straps. I didn’t have time to finish the hem of the shirt and between the time the model put it on and the time she walked down the runway the fabric began to curl and was a bit shorter than I meant.

I was in the bottom three again. I was beginning to suspect that I’m only being kept around because I’m so willing to freak out on camera. I was told that I missed the mark with this challenge, that it looked too much like workout clothes. Nina liked the strips of suede, Michael Kors said the red and black together was a travesty and Heidi said it wasn’t something she would wear. In the end I was kept because I displayed the ability to take direction and edit my look. Yay! I’m not off my (fake) show yet.

Ok, back to my real life. I would just like to say that apparently when I am nervous about what to wear in a new situation I feel like trying on every single dress that exists in the Seattle area will somehow fix the problem, even though I already have a wardrobe for my trip to New York. Do you overshop when anxious?

Previously: we took on episode one, the one with the bed sheets, episode two, the one with the dog toys, episode three, the one with stilts, and episode four, the one with Nina.

* In reality Scott has too much going on to continue in my little PR sweatshop. He’s doing all the normal busy work-life stuff as well as practicing to play in the wedding band of a friend. I’m a humanitarian so I let him go, but I didn’t give him his last week of wages. Spoiler: Also in reality, well, the actual Project Runway show, one of the contestants announced they no longer wanted to continue right at the start of this episode so it seemed like an obvious place to write Scott off of my version of the show.