Aussie, Aussie, Oi,oi, oi!

I will always be proud of my heritage which is being an indigenous Ibaloi of the Igorots from the highlands of the Philippines.  Yes, no one can take that away from me, because wherever in the world I may be, it will never fail to show, how I talk, and my very own culture still alive in me.  Having said all that, I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to live in my adopted country, the lucky country, which is Australia.  I will never forget that my precious second baby was born here and that both my children will be brought up in this country, and that the food on the table, the shelter over our heads, the memories that our family and my children will treasure will be majorly formed in this country. So it could be just fitting to pay tribute to a welcoming place to strangers like us, thankful that the wonderful people here has forgiven us as strangers and embraced us into their community.

And because I sew, I translated my gratitude by creating a sunsuit, Aussie style. And of course, you'd want to know how I made it.  The same theory applies, I got a swimsuit of my Savannah and just traced and traced and tweaked and adjusted and cut and cut and just relied on my dressmaker's rule for the curves and all.



 You can see I made a generous allowance for seams and shirring.

 Join the side seams,

and serge the sides too. It should like this now.

 Fold 1/4 seam twice for the top end of the chest part.

 Then shirr seven to eight rows on the chest part.

 I clipped the leg hole edges for easy folding when I made the casing for the elastic to go through.

 I just made half inch casing,

 Feed your elastic using a safety pin into your casing.

 Cut two 2" x 15" strips for straps.

 Fold opposite sides into 1/4' and fold in half

looking like this.

 top stitch both straps

 attach on the top most chest part

a

 stitch over the shirred lines, making sure you reverse on start and end avoid ripping.

 and because it's Australia day very soon, I free handed the words, OZ Oi, short for Aussie Aussie, Oi,oi, oi!

 I zigzagged the letters on to the back part of the suit, and there you go,

 An Aussie inspired sunsuit.

 Happy Australia day to us all here down under. Gidday mates!