One Pillow to Rule Them All!

You don't know this yet, but I'm a huge nerd. Truly. Thankfully, my partner is a dyed-in-the-wool nerd as well; it's probably why we get along so well.

For our first Valentine's day together, I decided to do something crafty and nerdy for my beau. There are two things you need to know about him to make sense of this gift, though:

1. He's a huge fan of Lord of the Rings (both the books and the movies). "Huge" may not adequately describe it. Example: we have the movie posters and a map of Middle Earth hanging in our bedroom.
2. He cuddles a pillow at night while he sleeps, whether or not I'm there to be cuddled.

Put these two together and you get

THE ONE PILLOW! (tm)

Pardon the sloppily-made bed! (You thought I was lying about the map of Middle Earth, didn't you?)

I should probably explain. You know the ring in LOTR which must be destroyed? (It's kind of important to the plot.) That's "the One Ring." It's inscribed in Elvish with the following lines from a longer poem:

One Ring to rule them all, 

One Ring to find them.

One Ring to bring them all 

and in the darkness bind them.

Well, the One Pillow has the same phrase embroidered on it in Elvish, only it says "One Pillow" instead of "One Ring." (The word "pillow" is in the golden letters.)

"One Pillow to rule them all..."

"...and in the darkness bind them!"

I looked up an Elvish font and how to spell "pillow" with it. (Crafting bonus: getting to justify my liberal arts education in a craft - in this case, using what I learned in Linguistics class about phonetics.) I then took an image of the two lines about the One Ring and edited it to replace the elvish for "ring" with "pillow."

...Did I mention that I'm a nerd? 

I wanted to make the lettering as accurate as possible, so I printed the lines out, pinned the paper to the pillow case, and embroidered over the paper using a split back stitch. (I found this looked better, covered up my uneven stitches a little, and was helpful for going around curves.) After I finished, I carefully tore the paper out from around the letters, and voila! All it needed was a squishable pillow. And yes, I did "cuddle test" all the pillows in the store before picking this one. 

My partner and I have been together for three and a half years now and he still loves his pillow.  I wash the pillow case when I wash the sheets, and it gets no special treatment - it goes in the machine with all the rest! (Ain't nobody got time for special treatment.) It's held up so well that I've considered doing other embroidery projects on our bed linens... but then I look down the dark path where this is going and realize that if I don't stop now, I'll end up with the Eye of Sauron on a duvet cover. No one needs to sleep under that.