The Hinterland Dress from Sew Liberated.

You know when you make a dress, and you let out a little squeal when you first try it on because you love it so much. Well, this ..

If I’m honest, I totally love most dresses that I have made – I wouldn’t be making them if I didn’t love their style and the fabric that I have lovingly cut and sewn together to create the image that I had in my head before I started. But this dress is another level.

The Hinterland Dress from Sew Liberated is a timeless classic design. The loose fitting silhouette can be mixed and matched to your own choice with options including sleeve lengths, placket length choices along with optional waist ties and those all important in-seam pockets.

Things that impressed me about this pattern right from the get-go …

The size range for this pattern is 0-34. Yes you read that right. This accommodates bust sizes from 31″ – 58.5″

The dress is part of a capsule collection and there are numerous patterns available on the Sew Liberated site that it can be paired with. (All very tempting too I might add).

After reading about the founder Meg McElwee, I can’t help admire her values and the business that she has built upon them.

Ok, back to the dress. First up let me tell you that I made a straight size 8. My measurements are 34-29-38, and I am 5’2″. As you see I chose to make the 3/4 length sleeves, and the bodice-only placket version.

I wanted to keep the colour palette neutral, so my fabric choice was a bargain beige tencel from Rainbow Fabrics. I’ll link it here as it is in stock now as I type, but beware, there is a high turnover of fabric in this store – fabrics just fly off the shelves!

This is the first pattern from Sew Liberated that I have sewn and I can’t fault it. It’s thorough, easy to understand with clear written instructions and drawings, and is a great advanced beginner pattern for those that want to challenge themselves with buttonholes, bias facings, bust darts and inset sleeves.

It was important to me that the bodice fitted nicely and felt comfortable, so before I started I made a quick toile of the bodice only to see how it looked. I noticed that it had a slightly gaping back neckline, so I knew that I needed to make a small gaping back neckline adjustment to my pattern piece which was no problem to do. There are several tutorials online which give great instructions on how to rectify this common fitting issue.

The bodice neckline is finished with a bias strip. Rather than using the dress fabric for this, I used a strip of bias tape that I had made myself with some ditsy floral cotton leftover from a previous project. I have lots of this in my stash, and is my favourite way of ensuring that no fabric ever gets wasted.

No details are left out, and the sleeves are finished with a sweet little cuff piece. How sweet would this cuff be in a different fabric ? (like the ditsy floral that I used for the neck facing) – I must try that another time! Talking of the sleeves, they went in effortlessly leaving a smooth shoulder seam with no puckering. I chose to add 5 buttons to the placket. (The pattern recommends either 4 or 5).

Also let’s not forget the lovely in-seam pockets. I raised the height of the pockets by 1″ BTW.

The waist tie is quite a statement from the back I think. It’s fairly wide and I wasn’t too sure that I would like this width. However now that I have seen these pics I feel that the width of the tie is very much in proportion with the dress – especially with this sleeve length. I am currently sewing my next Hinterland (yup, that’s how much I like this dress), and because I am making that version with short sleeves in a softer fabric, I might try making the tie a little narrower so as not to overwhelm it from the back view. We’ll see.

The final thing that I wanted to mention, is that I thought that I would try a ‘blind hem’ technique for the hem of the skirt. I actually don’t think that I have ever tried this before, as it looks a little bit tricky. I recently purchased a new sewing machine and noticed that it had a blind hem foot, so there’s no time like the present, and voila – it was really quite straightforward.

The video tutorial that I watched before giving it a go is this one from Made to Sew. It was really easy to follow.

Oh, I guess I should admit that I bought the hat first … and made the dress to go with it! I think I might have been a teeny bit inspired by one of the sample pictures on the Sew Liberated site. Ha! The Fedora is from T.K Maxx.

Thanks as always to my very patient husband for taking a million photographs at the beautiful Whatton House Gardens in Leicestershire.

Take care, and I’ll be back soon,

Kathy x

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