Last week was my first week at the new job. As a little bit of gentle morale support to myself, I wore my watch that my previous co-workers had given me as a leaving present (it’s lush, it makes my wrist smell like wood), and my mycobacteria earrings to allow my inner nerd to shine through to other microbiology nerds in the vicinity 🙂

As long as my new co-workers were even half as awesome as my old ones, I knew I would be ok, and they did not disappoint. My new co-worker Lina recognised my earrings right away, and the next day I wore some others I had been playing around with!

These are they:

Gram stain earrings!

I made them in pretty much the same way as the mycobacteria earrings, but instead of using white and blue for the background of the ZN stain, this time the background material in a Gram stain shows up pink due to the counterstain of safranin, or neutral red, so I used a whole lot of white with a little bit of pink. This time around I also spent a little more time smoothing off the edges using an old emery board!

In a Gram stained film, Gram-positive organisms show up a dark bluey-purple, and Gram-negatives pink.

So, what little beasties do we have here?

The dark purple colour is actually both the dark blue, and purple ultra fine tip Sharpies overlaid to get the right colour for Gram-positives, and the Gram-negative colour is the pale pink. Of course I could wear them in pairs together as above, or mix it up a little and play mix and match:

After discussions last week over lunchtimes and breaktimes of our favourite bacteria (we’re microbiologists after all!), my new co-worker said she liked Neisseria gonorrhoeae – to each their own! So I decided I would make her a pair too 🙂

It was also an ideal excuse to get out my Silhouette Cameo, and the new sketch pens that my brother sent me for my birthday, so I could make some sort of pretty thing to display them on.

I used the chevron pattern background that came free, and the metallic grey pen, and used it to cover some white cardstock. Then cut it up with my rotary cutter into small pieces just big enough for the earrings:

Finally just some holes poked through with a pin, and they were complete!

Cute non? She was having a bad case of the Mondays, but then I gave her the earrings and she was feeling happier! She put them in and wore them the rest of the day!