Hello, it’s Laineemakes here, back with another review of some brilliant fabric for Minerva. Taking a walk on the wild side with this beautiful animal print viscose challis. I don't often use animal prints but this viscose tempted me and I decided to use this to make a summer dress

This fabric is light and airy and has a lovely hand, it will be superb if we ever get back to having proper summer weather, not the torrential rain that we've been having here on the longest day of the year.

Being made from natural fibres this fabric is ideal for hot weather. After the usual pretreatment i.e. washing and ironing there are no signs of shrinkage. Do be careful of fraying though because this is a woven fabric and it does seem to shed quite a bit. When using a woven fabric like this which frays it's always worth taking the time to plan how you're going to manage it. For example, you might want to overlock the fabric before you start working with it to stabilise it. You could use pinking shears or some other method to prevent it from fraying further. Also, try to handle this as little as possible so that you don't cause any more damage.

The fabric is a little bit shifty when you're using it, but that's typical of such lightweight viscose, so make sure to use good methods to hold your fabric in position, such as pattern weights and I find that using a rotary cutter help so much when you've got fabric that tends to move about a bit.

Sewing up the fabric presented no problems at all. It went really easily, I went with the overlocker to sew up the long side seams of the skirt and also the bodice seams. The neckline requires sewing with a regular machine and some slip stitching to put your hand sewing skills to the test.

I paired this fabric with a pattern that I’ve had in the stash for a couple of years but it’s still available here. It's Mccalls M7119 which is a halter style sleeveless wrap dress with a high-low hemline. Now it's made up, I could easily see this fabric used to make up something like a Kielo wrap tress as well.

I asked for 4 meters of this fabric and used pretty much most of it because I chose Version B of this pattern which has a long and full skirt.

I love the finished article. This is really much nicer than I expected when I cut it out. The fabric drapes beautifully and feels really nice on the skin and the Hi-lo wrap effect is really pretty. I can see this going into my suitcase whenever I next get the opportunity to zap off somewhere sunny. This will be my absolute favourite summer sundress I’m sure.

Thank you once again Minerva for giving me this fabric to explore, I can highly recommend this for a cool summer sewing project.

Until next time,

Bye xx