Day 40 – Trilobite

Today is day 40, only 325 days to go! I’m feeling much better and thanks to everyone for all the well wishing – it really helped a bunch!

free motion quilting design trilobyte

Today’s filler is an exceptionally complicated wiggly little bugger that can be entirely blamed on my husband. Josh saw Fossil Snail and immediately thought of a Trilobite:

It turns out that Trilobites were around 540 million years ago and lived EVERYWHERE (kind of like a modern day version of a cockroach).

They left loads of fossils behind which make for beautiful textures with loads of variations!

Inspiration – To be honest, while designing Fossil Snail, I was actually thinking of a Trilobite, but couldn’t think of the name to search for a picture in Google.

It internet really is wonderful, but not very useful when you don’t know the name of what you’re looking for!

Josh saw Fossil Snail and of course with his head full of fishy knowledge (the guy knows more about biology than I do and I majored in it!) he remembered the name of this prehistoric creature immediately.

Difficulty LevelAdvanced. This is a tricky one, no doubt about that! You’ll want to have a good grip on your quilt and a solid idea of what you’re “drawing” as you go.

Design Family – Edge to Edge.

Directional Texture – Two Directions and Attention Getting. This is one of those fills that will take over your quilt design become a major element if you’re not careful.

You’ll notice that the second Trilobite got a bit fatter at the end. You can change this design quite a bit simply by changing up the body or the wiggly legs however you like.

Suggestions for Use – Because this design can easily dominate other designs, I’d hesitate to use it as a background filler. It would simply out compete everything around it!

Make sure to place it in small areas, like sashing, where it can run free on a limited range (kind of like cage free chicken).

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day

LeahDay

Leah Day has been teaching online since 2009. She's the creator of the Free Motion Quilting Project, a blog filled with thousands of quilting tutorial videos. Leah has written several books including 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day, and Mally the Maker and the Queen in the Quilt.

5 Responses

  1. Shirleymac says:

    Thanks so much for doing all this! I need to practice freemotion more and your video's are great. I can't believe you are doing all this work out of the goodness of your heart. You are one awesome lady. Thanks again.

  2. Leah Day says:

    Shirleymac – Thanks for the compliments! I'm not actually doing this out of the goodness of my heart.

    I'm doing it because I'm suffering from Excessive Stippling disease and MUST find the cure in inventing new filler designs. Ha!

    Truthfully this project is fun, challenging, and terribly scary all at the same time. It feels great though, to have a project to be constantly thinking about at all times of the day.

    Let's go Quilt!

    Leah Day

  3. Sharon says:

    Hi Leah! I love watching your demo each day and will one day start playing with machine quilting. (I'll let you know when that happens!) But today when you equate trilobites with cockroaches!… yuck! I may never look at a trilobite fossil the same way again! Your demos are awesome and glad you are feeling better.

  4. Anonymous says:

    Leah… LOVE the trilobite design. I have
    several for real ones that I found and have
    always wanted to do a trapunto quilted one.
    If I ever get one done, your design would
    certainly look nice as a background filler.
    Thanks!
    Shirley in MO

  5. Rona says:

    Love your designs. I put trilobites on the sashing of my latest wallhanging – but I think they look like centipedes. I've put a photo on my blog.
    Thanks for all your wonderful work.

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