Swimwear - in the middle of winter?

I seem to be making a habit of this - wait until the snows start, then start making swimwear.  But in this case I am justified - we're heading back to Australia for a couple of weeks in February and March and it'll be nice and warm over there so I wanted to make sure I had swimmers to take with me.

A while ago I made a two piece swim suit out of a beautiful peacock design swim suit material.  Whilst I'm fairly happy with the top, the bottoms do not sit nicely and I spend all my time whilst wearing them adjusting them - not fun.  So, since I had lots of left over material (I think I bought 2 or 3 meters of this stuff), I decided that I would like to make a new pair of pants.

I started with my basic underwear pattern, but added an extra inch to the the top and brought the legs down to make them more of a boy leg cut.  I then added a wide band around the top enclosing 1.5" wide elastic.  I lined the front of the pants with a teal coloured power mesh cut slightly smaller than the main piece.  Around the legs I used 1/4" wide elastic and turned over the edge two times to fully enclose it.  This was probably my only mistake - if there is one thing I don't like about these it's that they are just a smidge to narrow in the crotch area.  Otherwise I really like the way these turned out. And I now have a swimsuit which, whilst probably not the most flattering thing in the world is entirely wearable and quite comfortable - and really that's what matters most.

Now while I love two piece swimsuits for their comfort and convenience, they're not very sun smart - and in Australia that is a very big issue (It's amazing just how much more powerful the sun is in Australia than it is up here in Massachusetts).  So I decided that, since I still had plenty of material left over I should make myself a rash vest to go with my suit.  Now I don't know if you've ever tried to wear a rash vest, but getting them off whilst they are wet is really not very easy, so I decided to make mine with a zip up the front for easy access.

I used my princess seam raglan pattern that I developed for this shirt, cut about 1/4 to 3/8" off each seam to make it nice and snug and did a few little tweaks  to the princess seam and sleeve pattern based on my last make.  I cut the sleeves off mid bicep and finished them with a small 3/4" band.  The bottom is finished with a 3" band as well.  The collar is not the standard high mandarin that you normally find on rash vests as they annoy me, I figure this is more than good enough for keeping off the sun.

 

All seams were done on my serger (yeah I finally got it all fixed and working again), then stitched down with a zig zag stitch on my normal machine.

I really love the way this turned out, and think that this outfit will get quite a bit of wear.

It does however have some competition.  During one of my many trips to my local discount fabric store (can I just say here that the new location of Sewfistication on Rt9 in Framingham is fabulous, such a fantastic new space, and some great new fabric as well), I found this cool swim suit fabric, so of course I had to make a new suit.

The top is the based on the Bravo Bella bra pattern again.  This time however I cut the cups in two pieces rather than one as I do find the cups in the original swimsuit I made a bit to small.   I cut the back of the bra down to a single band (just the elastic encased in the fabric), and then made tiny little straps and created a criss cross pattern across the back with the shoulder straps.  I would have liked three straps on each side but couldn't fit them into the cups at the front.  Next time I'll cut the cups off lower to make a wider strap attachment and make three straps.

The pants I used the same pattern as shown at the end of this post. I decided to add in some aqua material at the sides for a bit of contrast.  I really should have spent a bit more time looking as pattern placement - I knew I didn't want any full circles, but all those cut off circles look a bit strange to me now.

As far as the style goes - I'm still not sure whether I like this style of pant or not - in some ways it's more comfortable, but I'm just not sure that it's all that flattering. I'm contemplating buying more of this material and making another pair of pants like I did for the other suit - and possibly another rash vest as well - we'll see how motivated I am in the coming weeks.  In the mean time I'll just have to mix and not match.