Today’s outfit is a tilt to Australia Day, created using a jacket salvaged from the reject pile when my son Max left home and a skirt from my op-shop stash which is a perfect colour-match.

This Australia Day, I am proud that champion footballer and anti-racism campaigner Adam Goodes is 2014 Australian of the Year because he is a great story of turning adversity into triumph through integrity, thoughtfulness, and hard work.

And of course, being Australia Day we’re on a countdown to the Triple J Hottest 100 which plays at parties across the nation.

I feel on-trend with my Sew it Again project because it was just two years ago in 2012 that the No 1 song was Michael Macklemore’s Thrift Shop about opportunity shopping and giving pre-loved clothing a second life.

At the time, Macklemore told triple j, the break-out single from The Heist album is an ode to the simple joy of buying pre-loved gear on the cheap: “All of my life I’ve been really into thrift shopping and just getting the most eclectic, eccentric outfits that you can possibly get and making them cool.”

For today’s dress-up, I cropped the sleeves off the jacket with pinking shears and then took the top in at the sides. I cut the gold stripes from the sleeves and sewed them as features on the skirt. To further enliven the skirt, I cut off the bottom then gathered that off-cut and sewed it to the lining in a dropped petticoat-style.