Trapunto Trilobite

This is a concept that leapt from the meeting of several streams of thought! I opened up Instructables and saw the soft toy contest announcement on the same day I'd been browsing plush toys of extinct animals - dinosaurs, but also Tiktaalik and the Tully Monster and some very nice trilobites. Hmm, thinks I, all these fossil animal friends are reconstructions, what we think the animal looked like when it was alive. Now that we've got a pretty good idea of what the Tully Monster maybe looked like, of course we want to project it in 3d and speculative living color, but what if we made a plush toy of the mystery. I immediately thought of trapunto as a way to evoke a fossil, a shadow in stone of a living being.

This is not a plush toy of the Tully Monster as a mysterious and expectation defying fossil. This is a trilobite as a fossil soft toy, because that sounded like fun. I love trilobites, and I thought of how much I would have loved a soft pillow plush style trilobite when I was a child. It also seemed like a good candidate for turning out well in trapunto, with their many segments and iconic, immediately recognizable anatomy!

This is my first trapunto project and I learned a lot along the way, some of it relevant. I'll try to share my new knowledge with you all!

Materials:

• Fabric – something for the main body (a fat quarter is an ideal size, but you could also use an old shirt or a different cut of bought fabric or anything) and then a light colored cotton (at least 11 by 13 inches) to hold the stuffing and be quilted together with the top
• Embroidery floss
• Stuffing
• Sewing Thread (optional! You could keep using your embroidery floss for the construction seams too)

Tools:

• Trilobite Template - I drew one drawing from a lot of photographs of specimens, especially this little guy from ancient Wisconsin! It's attached to this instructable as a pdf and as a jpeg - to get the sizing to match what I've described, you'll need to print it out so it's nine inches long on its long side.
• fabric pen or pencil
• seam ripper
• tweezers
• needle/s
• pins
• a ruler
• sharp scissors
• embroidery hoop
• a window where the light comes through, or a lightbox
• masking tape

Techniques:

• Running Stitch (Running Stitch Tutorial At Sarah's Hand Embroidery Tutorials)
• Whipstitch (Whipstitch Tutorial At Wikihow)
• Ladder Stitch (Ladder Stitch Tutorial At Wikihow)

If you have new fabric wash and dry fabric according to manufacturer's instructions, so that you know what you start embroidering on will be safe to wash after you're done!

Trace pattern onto outer fabric with fabric pen or pencil using a window as a light box. When you have sun coming through a window, use a little masking tape at the corners to tape up your trilobite template paper. Position your fabric that you want to show, to be the outside, over the pattern so that the edges of the trilobite are two and a half inches from the edges of your fabric either way. Tape it up with masking tape, and then trace!

Match your muslin – your plain light cotton fabric to hold the stuffing – to your main fabric so that when you sew your design on you will quilt the layers together. You can baste it, or just hoop up and do enough stitching in your first session that the layers will hold together when you unhoop.

If you're new to embroidery, jessyratfink did a great instructable on getting started, Embroidery 101. I'm using very simple stitches to make this trilobite, so I hope if you want to try, you can find a place to start!

Use a running stitch to stitch the entire trilobite pattern you traced onto the fabric. Don't worry about what the back looks like overmuch. Use as many knots as you need to. They will all be inside your stuffie, so only you will see!

Always unhoop if you're taking a long break in stitching, especially overnight. This will prevent your fabric developing deep wrinkles and keep it easy to keep stitching.

You'll have to move the hoop as you work through the design, probably, because this trilobite is a chonker! It's okay, though, just finish off the strand of floss you're on, unhoop, and rehoop. The tension doesn't have to stay exactly the same so long as you can work with it.

When you've stitched your trilobite, unhoop and take off your pen marks/guidemarks according to the instructions on your pen or pencil's package.

Now it's time for the next step in trapunto!

To work trapunto you open up little openings in each area that you want to be raised when you're finished. Apparently people used to do this by using a fine grade cheesecloth as their backing fabric and then using a knitting needle to gently move the threads aside so they didn't have to sew anything back up again when they'd done their stuffing. This sounds like fun and I want to see how it works sometime! But my scrap muslin was way too tightly woven to move the threads around with a knitting needle, so I used a seam ripper to make my openings.

The great thing about the seam ripper was that it made it fairly easy for me to control the size of the cut I was making, and also let me be pretty sure that I was only taking up the muslin for cutting, and not the heavier calico front that I did not want holes in. You will want to keep your cut as close to the grain as possible, so it doesn't stretch or fray too far, and you will want it to be as small as you can make it and still get stuffing in. It's a lot more difficult to stitch the hole again if your cut is large or fraying!

When the space you're going to stuff is open use some small wisps of stuffing to stuff the segment. They need to be really small, smaller than you're probably going to think at first. It's okay, you can keep adding these small wisps until your design is stuffed firmly and raised high. But you can't get a large chunk of stuffing to go where you want it to in these small spaces you're stuffing, if you can get it to go in your tiny opening at all, so it's easiest to work with little pieces and build your stuffing slowly.

I did this a few ways before I found what worked for me.

The spaces on this trilobite are far too small to use your fingers to stuff them.

You can use the seam ripper to gently push the stuffing in, but have to be very careful to make sure you don't cut your embroidery stitches. I cut mine a few times, and it's not the end of the world! You can always put a few new stitches in along the line of the originals and secure your pattern again by backstitching.

I also used tweezers. It takes a bit of practice to get the tweezers into the very small hole while holding the stuffing, but you can't cut your embroidery with them, and the tweezers make it easy to move and manipulate the stuffing – to get it all the way to the ends of the trilobite's long thin body segments, for example.

Tweezers worked best for me, but some of my sources also suggest using knitting needles to move the stuffing, or large, blunt tapestry needles. Maybe an unsharpened pencil or a (clean) disposable chopstick would make a good tool. This is my first experiment, and I want to experiment more!

When your segment is stuffed, whipstitch the hole you opened shut again. It's okay if some of the stuffing will not be restrained and fuzzes through your stitches- this part is going to be protected and hidden! (I had a real problem with this on some of my segments – I think a few of them are more 'darned' than 'whip stitched shut'!)

When you've stuffed and closed one segment, move on to the next. Keep going like this until you have stuffed the trilobite's entire anatomy, from headshield to tail. This trilobite template I've provided has forty segments, so it might take several hours. Don't worry if it's taking a while.

(I listened to a recorded book while I sewed and stuffed! It was nice to have a story but also be able to keep my eyes on my work.)

Tah daaaaah! Now you have a trapunto'd trilobite!

You could do a lot of things to make this trapunto piece into a soft toy. It might be fun to do a sensory quilt full of fossil animals, and then this would be one panel! I was thinking about pre-printed or applique cut and sew dolls that are essentially cushions with a picture of a critter on them, so I made mine simply a pillow.

If you are using a fat quarter of fabric, the way I did, and placed your trilobite two and a half inches in from the corner of the fat quarter, the way I did, then you can do what I did – cut the unembroidered part of your fat quarter into two pieces, put the right sides together, and sew a seam down the long side with the same running stitch you used for the embroidery. To make it just a little stronger and a little less likely to pull and get stretchy on you while you're working with the fabric, you can put a single backstitch in every ten to fourteen stitches or so. You'll get a back piece the right size to attach to your trapunto trilobite front and make a pillow!

Press the seam flat, with an iron if you have one. Finger pressing can get you a long way if you don't have an iron, so you can try that! Place your embroidered front and your back right sides together, and use your running stitch again to sew them together. I used a half an inch seam to make sure and catch all the layers.

Leave a gap in the middle of one side to turn and stuff the pillow. Four inches is probably best – I tried three, but I had real trouble working the trapunto trilobite through that gap, because it is already stuffed and stiff.

Clip your corners and seams to take out bulk, and turn your pillow rightside out. Stuff your pillow! It is easiest to stuff the corners first, and then fill in the middle, so that you don't have to try and push stuffing around to get to the corners, you can directly place it there instead. When you have stuffed your soft toy to your satisfaction, ladder stitch the opening closed.

Tah daaaah! It's a trapunto trilobite on a soft slab of matrix!