Happy Birthday, Girlfriend

***I wanted to answer a couple of the questions in the comments. I definitely used a pattern for the pillow. The signature is my actual signature though. I wrote it and scanned it and had a stamp made of it. So for this, I stamped it and then stitched over the stamping. The pillow didn't take long. I probably worked on it for about 5 days but only a couple hours a day. This includes starting it and changing my mind on the colors and starting over. It took me longer to find all of the fabrics I wanted to use. The original pattern was in the July/August 2007 issue of Quiltmaker magazine. They don't sell that issue anymore, but a very helpful commenter left a link to this site which is selling the pattern: Silver Linings Quilting. Thanks, Regina!! And thanks for everyone else's comments too. I appreciate each and every one. :) ***

I have a friend from high school who recently had a birthday. When we were in HS we were close but had a falling out (we laugh about it now). Shortly after HS we made up and became practically inseparable. Now we live 2000 miles apart and thanks to facebook, can keep in touch easily. She recently lost her dog so I decided to make her this cute paper pieced puppy pillow that I saw in a magazine a while back. She has had a rough time of it lately, so I was happy to send her something to lift her spirits. Here's the pillow:



Here is the back. I used this tutorial to put the zipper on it. When you use a full pillow form like I did, the front seems like it looks better with a zipped back and I liked the look of a hidden zipper. The tutorial was very easy to follow.



I decided to embroider my name on the back. I used my usual name stamp to stamp the image, and then just did a simple backstitch to embroider it.



Here is a simple card I made for her. I knew she would probably get it late (although she got it later than I was hoping) so the inside says "oops! It's a hare past your birthday". I didn't think to take a picture of the inside.


ingredients:
Stampin' Up Birthday Banter stamp set
Stampin' Up Cloud embossing folder
Copic Markers
EK Success border punch
Kraft cardstock: Stampin' Up
White cardstock: Neenah Paper
Green Cardstock: Bazzill

Winter runner

This started out as a Christmas runner. But I didn't get it done in time and Christmas has come and gone, so I'm calling it a winter runner. It's not super Christmassy anyway. I used the Emerson Street Table Topper tutorial at the Moda Bake Shop, only I substituted a couple of plain blocks on each long side and I also shortened it some, since my table isn't all that long. Warning-if you ever try this tutorial, there have been corrections made on the blog post that were NOT made on the pdf file. Therefore, mine is also a slightly different width. The fabric is Colorful Christmas from Riley Blake.





Pictured below is the back, which is pieced from the leftovers. The binding is also pieced from leftovers. I did use bias binding, but because of the corner pinwheel blocks I decided to make mitered corners instead of my usual rounded ones. But even with mitering, I think it is so much easier with bias binding.
 

For the label, I decided to use a tutorial from Jaybird Quilts to incorporate my label into the back. It was much easier and since I was already piecing the back anyway, it was not any extra work. I didn't have to worry about remembering to sew the label on while binding or after finishing it. I loved this method. It's hard to see it, but on the picture above, the label is right by the top left corner of the green fabric. Here is a close-up.