[completed] minecraft cake

Today is Adam's birthday!

Say happy birthday to Adam!

To celebrate, I made him a plushie Minecraft cake, 

complete with a happy birthday card!

completed: 10 minute wrist rest

wrist rest

I have been playing a lot of Diablo III (which is a new computer game, if you are living under a rock), but my left wrist always ends up hurting from resting on the hard computer case. It's been cramping my style. Literally.
So today, I devised a quick and easy solution: a handmade wrist rest! Store-bought rests can run up to $15 - which is ridiculous. I made mine for under $2!
I used a piece of leftover fabric from another project, folded it in half, and cut along the fold to make two equally-sized pieces. I stitched the two pieces right-sides-together, leaving a gap to turn it right-side-out. Then I filled the resulting pouch three-quarters of the way full with rice, stitched along the top to close it, and voila! A cute wrist rest!
If I had wanted to be fancy, I could have secured the gap with a hidden ladder stitch, or stitched all the way around the bag before filling it with rice so that the top seam wouldn't be out-of-place. But I was going for functionality over beauty today.

completed: geeky binary love cross-stitch

01001001000100000011011000011011110111011
00110010100100000011110010110111101110101
i love you

This is a cross-stitched code of binary that translates to "I love you", and is a surprise gift for Adam. 

I've been working on this cross-stitch for the past two days. Cross-stitching always takes longer than I expect!

It is cross-stitched using three strands of black embroidery floss on "grasshopper" green 14-count Aida, framed in a simple black 5 by 7 inch frame. The color scheme is reminiscent of old computer screens. 

It took almost two skeins of floss to finish this pattern (which I designed (if you can call it that) on 14-count graph paper). I was inspired by techie fonts, and I found one sample that only had "ABC123", so I took the "1" from that and then made up the "0" to match. I used a simple heart at the end to finish the design.

design on graph paper