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