The Creative Hinterland

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The Creative Hinterland

A pattern making course for mindful sewists

Making your own clothes is an art form.

Pattern making is the deeper language of wardrobe artists, the language that lets you express your own artistic voice, putting the sewing skills you’ve honed to a higher purpose.

Sew Liberated’s online pattern making course, The Creative Hinterland, will teach you that language.

Learn pattern making by creating these 12 mouthwatering hacks of the Hinterland Dress

The Creative Hinterland: Patternmaking for Mindful Sewists teaches you the skills you need to modify sewing patterns to your liking, bringing a spirit of playfulness to your sewing hobby and your closet.

You’ll work alongside Judith to draft the pattern for each Hinterland hack, deepening your skills and understanding with each project.

Pattern making topics covered:

  • Tools and supplies
  • How-to coaching on research and style planning
  • Mindset coaching
  • Rotating darts into new locations
  • Creating new seams, including color blocking and princess seams
  • Changing seam locations and functions through developing yokes and closures
  • Adding design ease through gathers, slash and spread, and in seams
  • Changing armhole and neckline shaping
  • Adapting sleeves to different styles and fit preferences
  • Developing raglan seams in two different ways
  • Drafting different edge finishes like shaped facings and bias facings
  • Drafting collars, including flat collars and a convertible collar
  • Creating new pocket styles
  • Drafting a circle skirt to fit your bodice
  • Drafting a culotte bottom to fit your bodice
  • Developing details such as pintucks, keyhole necklines, and released darts
  • And much more!

Bonuses:

  • Our Pattern Hacking Process Guide, which gets you from idea, to plan, to implementation – for any hack.
  • The Guide to Creating Sewing Steps, so you can hack anything and figure out the best way to sew it together.
  • Printable Project Planner
  • Half-scale Hinterland bodice patterns for practicing
  • Printable, full-scale Hinterland bodice pieces without seam allowances, for easier pattern manipulation
  • 12 really fun new pieces for your closet!

The course content – the videos and guides – are available any time, so you are encouraged to go at your own pace. There’s no need to rush through this material.

Your access never expires.

Cover of the Hinterland Dress Fitting Guide

Our illustrated guide walks you through diagnosing and making pattern changes for 26 common fit adjustments, so all your Hinterlands will fit perfectly.

What’s more – our guide will provide you with the knowledge to fit ANY darted woven bodice!

This Guide is from the first module of our Creative Hinterland pattern making course, giving you a taste of what that class has to offer.

Looking for more help? Our Learn to Fit and Sew Bodices class provides detailed fitting instruction, as well as a complete Hinterland sew-along.

sewing is the best friendship hack!

Your course includes membership in our online support group, hosted on our own website. No Facebook necessary!

Throughout the course, you’ll benefit from the expertise we here at Sew Liberated have gained from teaching over 1500 students like yourself. We delve deeply into mindset work, setting you up for a light-hearted, forgiving, and resilient approach to learning this new skill.

It’s a warm, mindful, supportive, safe space for you to learn new skills and make new friends.

Meet the 12 Hinterland Hacks

The Hinterland Dress provides the perfect canvas for practicing your pattern making skills. Once you’ve zeroed in on your perfect bodice fit with our free Fitting Guide, the world is your oyster for spin-off designs: new collars, reshaped necklines, dart rotation, different sleeves, even complete silhouette changes.

Your instructor,

Judith Henrikson

Head of pattern development and fitting here at Sew Liberated, Judith’s wealth of knowledge about the technical aspects of sewing is rivaled only by her compassion, patience, and thoughtfulness.

Think of her as your super supportive big sister when it comes to anything sewing. There’s nothing she loves more than helping others increase their creative confidence.

When she’s not sewing, you’ll find her with a cup of coffee and some cozy socks, homeschooling her two girls in BC, Canada.

Judith Henrikson, teacher of Sew Liberated's pattern making course, the Creative Hinterland

Who is the Creative Hinterland for?

We designed this course for the intermediate to advanced sewist who feels pretty confident they have the technical skills to tackle most any sewing pattern, but who doesn’t yet have the pattern making skills to bring their own creative vision to a pattern, either through hacking an existing pattern or creating their own.

  • It’s perfect for you if you’re an intermediate to advanced sewist and you love a handful – or all – of the 12 Hinterland hacks we teach in this course. You may not have considered learning patternmaking skills before, but sometimes having a clear goal, or a desire to make something specific, provides the spark that can light your fire for new knowledge or skill acquisition.
  • Perhaps you want to to refine your fit and your style preferences. Like a musician who can transpose a piece of piano music to a different key to better fit their vocal range, you can use the pattern drafting knowledge you gain in this course to make changes to existing patterns to better fit your body, or better fit your style.
  • Or, you could be someone who really wants to economize your time, resources, and money by taking the time to get the fit right for a single pattern, then maximizing your effort by riffing on that perfect fit to produce a variety of looks. Perhaps making the most of what you already own speaks to you.

By the time you’re done with this course, you’ll have the knowledge and confidence to bring your own creative vision to any project you undertake in the future.

At Sew Liberated, we believe you are not just a capable crafts-person. We know that within you lies an artist, waiting to burst through your (well-sewn) seams. 😜 

Our groundbreaking, one-of-a-kind online course, The Creative Hinterland: Patternmaking for Mindful Sewists, shows you how to access – and nurture – the artist within.

FAQs 

What level of sewist should take this course?

Intermediate and beyond.

You’ll want to be familiar with a wider variety of techniques than you’ll cover in the first few courses within the Learn to Sew Your Clothes series. The course doesn’t teach you to sew, or even to draft patterns from scratch. It assumes that you know a bit about (or are willing to figure out) things like seam allowance, grainline, plackets, buttonholes, sleeves, etc. Because you’re developing your own sewing instructions as you go, a willingness to make samples to try out ideas, do research in your closet and your resources, and a general confidence in your ability to make mistakes will support you well. 

If you’re a confident beginner, we recommend you look into our other online course featuring the Hinterland Dress, Fit and Sew Bodices. In Fit and Sew Bodices, you will learn how to properly fit a woven bodice to your body, as well as learn all the sewing skills required to sew the original Hinterland Dress pattern.

I’m not sure which Hinterland Dress course to take – this one or Fit and Sew Bodices. Which one is best for me?

We wrote a blog post to help you decide!

In general, this course, The Creative Hinterland: Patternmaking for Mindful Sewists, is made for confident intermediate to advanced sewists.

Fit and Sew Bodices: The Hinterland Dress is aimed toward beginners and intermediate sewists.

Does the course include patterns for the hacks?

It doesn’t – we’ll teach you how to make your own! At the end of the course, you will have 12 patterns that you can use (and modify) again and again – patterns that you will be proud to have drafted yourself, following our step-by-step video instructions.

Does each hack come with sewing instructions?

No, you will be making up your own, with our help. Because we want to equip you for being able to bring any future idea to life, we will mentor you, with the help of our Guide to Creating Sewing Steps, in the practical art of figuring out how to sew any garment you dream up.

Will my course materials expire? Do I get lifetime access?

Yes, with your purchase you get lifetime access to the course videos, Creative Hinterland support group, and other materials. You also get lifetime access to the downloadable PDF Hinterland Dress sewing pattern.

What if I only like a handful of the hack designs?

You don’t need to make them all! The hacks are presented in order, from simplest to more complex, so even if you don’t end up making a muslin or a dress/top in your fashion fabric, we still recommend going through each hack and practicing drafting the hacks on paper, so you become familiar with the patternmaking concepts being taught during each hack. 

In fact, we have included half-scale bodice pieces for you to do just that – practice! This will save you time, table space, and paper, especially if you don’t envision yourself wearing the final hack.

Will the hacking skills I learn be applicable to other patterns?

Yes! The lessons are focused on building your understanding of the techniques and principles, as well as working through specific projects, so that you build skills that are endlessly applicable in future projects!

How long will this take me to complete?

That is up to you! You have lifetime access to the course and all associated materials, so you can go at your own pace.

If you sped right along, you could probably draft a hack and sew a dress/top in one week, so perhaps the fastest you could finish the course would be 12 weeks. However, you don’t need to rush. This is the kind of course you could set aside for a while if life gets busy and not lose ground.

When can I start, and how much does it cost? 

You can start right away! The cost is $295, which includes the Hinterland Dress PDF sewing pattern, over 20 hours of video instruction, many useful materials and a private course community.

I’m terrible at math, will I be okay?

Yes! You’re allowed to use a calculator. 😀

We have a conversion chart so that you can do all of your math in metric or decimals, so no adding of fractions is necessary. You need to know how to read a ruler, add, subtract, multiply and divide, with a calculator. And there’s no exam at the end! 

Will you be releasing any of the hacks as Hinterland expansion packs? 

We don’t have plans to produce any of the hack designs as fully graded patterns for individual sale.

I am not a person who tends to make muslins. Can I still enjoy the results of this course?

This course is all about development – learning a skill just like learning music. You’ll have to practice your scales and learn new pieces long before you get to a recital, so making muslins is essential to that practice of practicing.

If you don’t make muslins and simply cut into your good fabric, you’ll have the same results as going to perform at a recital without ever having played the piano. You certainly will learn things, even if you insist on cutting the good fabric first, but it will be more costly and potentially more frustrating. If you are willing to slow down and enjoy the process itself on the way to the finished garment, you’ll get the most out of this course.

What type of person will enjoy The Creative Hinterland? 

This course is great for so many types of personalities, but some common characteristics are: a sense of adventure/curiosity, willingness to play and make mistakes, and a willingness to try to follow detailed technical instructions as well as do some research for yourself. 

You’ll be given tools and ideas for different ways of moving through the course material, so you can try just watching, working in a small scale, making muslins, and more, until you find a workflow that supports your learning process. 

Have other questions?

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Course Includes

  • 8 Modules
  • 37 Lessons