Mightbite Bite Painted Bat

First. Happy Halloween!!! Yayayay!!! ???? Second, omg omg omg this bat totally turned out bananas foster. I’m obsessed with all of Lillyella’s patterns and this Midnight Bite foundation paper pieced pattern takes the cake. Legit fun y’all. Legit fun.

So with anything animal, I immediately look to nature to find inspiration. Like seriously I think I googled every colored bat I could imagine until “orange bat” and the painted bat inspiration popped up and I was like yeeeeeeeeees. 

    

Then I pulled 5 different Pure Elements solids and was ready to go. Now the background fabric wasn’t as easy breezy for me and I totally had an argument with myself over a few choices. In the end, I went with the Laced Remains Hazed print from Katarina Rocella‘s Recollection collection. 

When piecing the bat, I followed the pattern in the inspiration picture with the colors and I must root my own horn a little because halfway through I was all like oooooooooh me like. 

Then when I was finished piecing I did a backflip in my head because look look:

So looking at the mini in its entirety, I knew that I needed to free motion quilt it to highlight the pattern in the background. I hadn’t done it before on my domestic machine, but like anything else I was game to give it a go. First I had to test it.

It wasn’t a 10, but I was super stoked that I was able to get in the FMQ zone to do some patterns I knew. Theeeen, I was introduced to Queen Leah Day and her video on how to break a darning foot, which legit changed my world.​ 

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And one thing I never expected was how rad the back would look when I was done. Thank goodness I used black on the back and white bobbin thread because it blew my mind!

For the front, I used Bright Orange Aurifil thread to emulate the vasculature in a bat’s wings. I alsoused the linen from The Denim Studio by AGF to bind the mini and voila, the Midnight Bite Painted Bat was born.

Happy happy happy Halloween! Be safe and don’t eat too much candy!