The Devil is in the Details

This blog has been a while in the making, partly because I’m not sure what more can be said about the iconic Hinterland dress.  There are over 13k tags for #hinterlanddress on Instagram and that’s before you start counting hacks and typos!

I haven’t veered away from the standard pattern (yet) but there are seemingly endless hacks online, contributing to how amazing this pattern is!  I have three Hinterland dresses, all are knee length with 3/4 length sleeves.  However, the dress allows for some thoughtful details once you’ve got the hang of the construction.

For my wearable toile of the Hinterland, I used some crinkle crepe fabric.  It refused to be turned into bias binding, so I used some satin contrast binding which I ended up really liking.  It’s often the case that a convenience/imaginative workaround ends up being a favourite feature.  I used some pink buttons to complement the binding too.

My second Hinterland has a full button placket.  I’ve realised from wearing it a number of times that I never use the buttons on the skirt, so will probably avoid them in future.  Why sew more buttonholes than I need to?!

My most recent Hinterland is where I have lots of hidden details that I’m proud of.  It’s a cotton velvet, which meant cutting out was a careful task to make sure the nap was going the same way for every piece.  I’m a “stroke down” fan myself!

I decided having pockets in my main fabric would risk making the dress stick out at my hips, so I cut the pockets from floral cotton lawn remnants that I used for a lampshade.  To avoid the possibility of the lawn peeking out at the end of the pockets, I used the selvedge of the velvet (which had an amazing bit of sparkle in it) at the end of the pocket piece.  The end result is really fun, with a disguised thinner pocket and a sparkly edge. I don’t think I did the construction in the most efficient way, but figured it out in the end.

To work with the velvet, I added two other details.  As with my first dress, the fabric was not destined for bias binding.  I had some silver satin-y binding in my stash that worked well and feels nice against my skin. I chose to do hidden binding on this dress. 

I was worried about a velvet hem getting stuck to my tights, so I added a length of ‘shiny’ ribbon on the inside of the hem to counteract that problem.  This works really well and I haven’t noticed the hem getting stuck on my tights.

Thanks for reading :o)