Birthday Pillow

since moving house several months ago, we've made quite a few friends in our neighbourhood. one of which is Janie. she's awesome. we have some things in common which bring us together to talk often. anyway, it's her birthday today, so i whipped up this cute pillow for her:

i came across this free pattern whilst perusing blogland. i'm a follower of Julie at Jaybird Quilts and was led to Basic Grey where they have this Star Fall Pillow pattern to download for free! :) so i did. and made it in one evening.

the back is a simple envelope closing. easy enough. i love that pink stripe!

i made the label this morning. gotta love personalised labels. :)

i like the look of sewn handwriting. it adds character.

i hope she likes it!

Happy Birthday lovely lady!

because geeks need cute things too...

this weekend, i got to sit down and do some fun embroidery. it was the last weekend of spring break, so i was determined to get a few more crafty things done before back to the school grindstone. check this out:

how cool is that? this is the molecule responsible for the taste of chocolate. awesome. it was interesting to note during my research, that if you exchange another CH3 in place of one of those double bonded oxygens (i can't remember which one exactly right now) you get caffeine. makes sense really...

so i changed majors a few times before i finally settled on business, but i used to be a chemistry major. and i was pretty good at it too. i got to be a classroom assistant for my chemistry professor (who would ever want to do an extra, voluntary chemistry class? ME!) and i even did a semester-long internship at the local middle school with their science department and got to teach a lab... anyway, i am a science geek and i LOVE learning about it. one of the things i really loved was drawing the structural formulas of compounds - especially ones that are common substances, like chocolate!

they have such interesting shapes. so i really wanted to get some stitched and displayed in my craft room. i decided to do my favourite flavours. :)

root beer is my absolute favourite drink ever. yum! side note rambling story: when i was younger, and lived in the UK, McDonald's used to serve root beer. i'd get one every time. then for some reason or another, they didn't anymore. no where else sold it. it's just a soda no one seems to like over there (except for special peeps like me!) so one of the things i LOVE about living in the US now is that root beer is EVERYWHERE! it took a long time before i stopped asking my husband "do they serve root beer here?" at every restaurant. haha!

yes. rose is a flavour. ever had turkish delight? YUM! another thing that's rare in the US. :( i guess sometimes you can't have the best of both worlds... not only is it a yummy smell, it's a pretty nice taste too, when coupled with sugar and theobromine! ;)

gotta love science sewing!