Making the Hinterland Dress (but really the #OutlanderObessed Dress)

Hello and welcome to a New Year on the blog. I hope you will join me in my sewing adventures this year and to start things up, I am putting another item into Ruby’s wardrobe of extraordinarily pretty things. As a novice dressmaker, I am slow and a bit sceptical about making my own clothes, but you don’t know until you try and my quest to find clothes that I like (as a 57 year old) and that fit me (as a 57 year old) is never going to be easy. The Hinterland Dress by Sew Liberated often pops up on my instagram feed and it looked like the kind of easy wear dress that would be good in winter or summer weight fabric. It has 3/4 sleeves which I think are always flattering, especially if you are a little older and they suit all weathers too. As I also had in mind to add a few ‘Outlander’ or rather 19th century touches this dress to give it a bit of individuality. Being a bit of a nut for the lovely tv series, I am always drooling over the costumes which even though they were rather monumental, do have some lovely feminine Georgian style features. In fact my ideas were not all that out of line with contemporary styles of today and a little frill here and there and an embroidered border around the bottom, seemed infinitely wearable everyday.

The fabric I chose is Essex yarn dyed linen in ‘Pecan’ by Robert Kaufman. This is quite a sturdy weight linen for an ‘all year around wear’ and I couldn’t tell one side from the other so that was definitely a plus. The frills around the neck and sleeves are Liberty ‘Capel’ fabric, possibly my all time favourite design and it comes in quite a few colour ways so you can always find something that matches. I used a chambray fabric for the hemline embroidered border, but more about that later.

The instruction book that comes with the pattern is really very clear and easy to follow and I give it top marks for it’s user friendly illustrations too. As linen is notorious for fraying, I wanted to use french seams throughout for a professional finish and I don’t have an overlocker and this was straightforward enough. The bodice went together easily and adding the frill on was easy too.

The pleated frill around the neck is made with a strip of liberty fabric (2.5 inches wide) folded in half lengthways with the short ends folded and pressed in. It is cut on the straight which is in contrast to the bias cut neck facing. It surprised me how easy and effective this was and I liked the look of it lying flat on the dress front, even though I hadn’t really planned it that way. I added some binding around the neck to pull it all together and cover up any raw edges and here I felt my quilt making helped me.

I repeated the frill on the sleeves and this is my favourite part of the dress. It is so feminine and the 3/4 length means you can wear bangles and bracelets and they don’t get lost in reams of fabric.

Once I had got this far, I turned my attention to the embroidered border. I used a long strip, the same length as the two skirt panels and pressed it in half lengthways with the idea to encase the bottom of the skirt pieces inside it and hence avoid messy raw edges and make sure that the wrong side of the embroidery wasn’t exposed either. The motifs were floral sprigs using just 4 colours of perle cotton #8 and there was nothing overly fussy about these as I just wanted to add an original touch to the piece.

A narrow ribbon strip of liberty fabric tied it all together nicely and I was really pleased with the look of this.

Once the skirt was finished and ready to attach, I went back to the top to do the button hole plackets. I had never done anything like this before but the instructions in the pattern were very clear and actually despite my apprehension, it was remarkably simple. I practiced the button holes and had to make them a little wider as I was planning to use covered buttons and these are quite deep. The linen was easy to work with and I just took my time with it. I have a Janome Horizon machine and let’s be honest - it does all the work.

So the dress is finished and it is well enough made too (for a novice). What do I think of it? Not entirely convinced by the style and also in my paranoia to be sure it fitted, I chose to make a size bigger than I need and actually it is a bit on the large size, but this is entirely my own fault. On the pattern there are ties from the side seams and I didn’t add these as generally I am not all the keen on a bow at the back but now that it is finished I see why they are a good idea because you can pull in the waistline and I now feel this was a mistake on my part. Although it’s a comfortable dress with it’s loose high waist, perhaps I need to think about the sort of style I need for my shape. I am not tall - 5’2” on a good day and curvy, so dresses are probably always going to be hard. If you are tall and willowy, I think this style is probably gorgeous, if you are me …. maybe not so much. I am going to tweak it probably by putting some button tabs at the sides to pull it in a little and then I think it will be fine. I absolutely love the embroidered hemline and think it will look good with winter boots or summer espadrilles.

I realise too how I have gotten out of the way of wearing dresses. Like everyone, I live in Jeans and especially during all this enforced time at home, never seem to dress up at all. It felt alarmingly strange to wear a pretty dress. It’s been a lovely experiment and I have learned a lot of technical stuff which I will carry with me on to the next project.

Toodle ….oooo Ruby x

You might also be interested in ‘Making an Outlander tartan quilt’

and also ‘Dressmaking, getting older and a vintage peplum jacket’