I just fell down a massive rabbit hole, which seems apt considering this post is about rabbits.
I was looking for past images of egg cosies and I got sucked into looking at my life over the past 14 years in blog and shop photos. As I write (or used to, anyway) two blogs, one for sewing and one for gardening/cooking, it was a full-on nostalgia trip of how the house and garden used to look (tidy and new! I had so much more time for them than I do these days), how cute the boys once were and loads of sewing designs I’d forgotten about.
Anyhow, sorry, back to the point.
Cosies were one of the very first things that I made and although in truth they don’t sell brilliantly consistently, the woodland linen rabbit ones (the third incarnation, after brown mice and the original trio above) have been one of the most popular magazine requests of all my work, including getting into the hallowed pages of Country Living, and every Easter, there is a flurry of sales. It’s interesting, when we were kids we were always served our dippy eggs covered in a cosy but I never think to do the same when making eggs myself.
I had started a batch some time ago using a really pretty grey/blue Liberty Tana Lawn in the Betsy print but I got obsessed by the idea of using coral pink ric-rac which I simply haven’t been able to source, not in 100% cotton anyway. Then last week, in an attempt to close up some project boxes (I keep all of my work stacked in Ikea see-through A4 boxes and there are a LOT of them at the moment), I relented and used some blue polyester ric-rac from my old stash. I don’t think anyone buying one of the cosies cares if the trim is 100% cotton or not and the blue looks really pretty, in fact probably better than pink would have.
They started off really quick and I wondered why I don’t make them more often, then I got to the ears – the bl*@dy ears!! What a nightmare they are to get even, they tend to head off at jaunty angles no matter what you do so I end up unpicking and re-sewing them a number of times. The ric-rac also doesn’t always match at the sides no matter how careful I am, but I’ve had to suck that one up and remember that they are handmade and should look so (in a professional kind of way, if you know what I mean).
I really struggle to purposefully stitch the arms to look like they’ve been ‘sketched’, which is how I want them to look, as my instinct is to stitch the second line exactly on top of the first, I have to make them a bit wobbly on purpose which kind of triggers me a bit!
They are done and a final batch of red ric-rac ones are on the way (to use up my final length of it) and then I might really retire the design and move on.
You can find them here.
No idea what’s next, it’s half term and I always find it difficult to work with the boys in the house so I hope to address some of the hand-sewing in more unfinished project boxes as one of the boys has taken over my workbench for Art homework. For now, back to old photos and admiring how my garden used to look!
They were very typical of my taste at the time and of how my Christmas tree looked.
But as happens, my taste has changed slightly and we’ve gone a bit more gaudy these days with ‘trash tree’ and it’s odd assortment of broken plastic deer, santas and 1980’s foil decorations.
It seemed like a great opportunity to make new mice, something I’d always planned to do, but more fitting to our ‘new’ (to us!) decorations (well I say that, quite a few came from a trash bag Mum once started in the attic and I rescued them, like the sad little hoarder I am 🙂 ).
Then I remembered my promise not to buy new fabric when I have plenty to use up. Boring. Oh well, orange and purple is not so bad and still fitted the brief. The orange silk is lush, it has a gold and hot pink crossweave, I will be very sad when it is all used as you can no longer buy it.
And I decided a little boy was needed after all, leading to a total inability to chose what colour he would be which went on for some days (as I carried on stitching the girls).
Until I had a little girl mouse army going on.
Then I bit the bullet and went for pink for the boys (I tried green and blue but that didn’t look right).
After which followed more looooonnnng days of hand sewing. These mice take a really, really long time to make. Much longer than it appears.
But I managed to binge watch all of Stranger Things (or re-watch, actually, as I’ve seen it all once) ready for a fantastic day out at Secret Cinema whilst drinking lots of peppermint tea from my new festive mug. Wild days. I know how to live.
The final little touches!
And a day of trying to photograph, edit and list them and they are finally done – hurrah!
I bought a box of Quality Street especially for photographing them with but they looked better with Lindt chocolates…I think it’s the round shape, it just seemed to work better…I may have eaten a few.
You can find them 
For packaging the mice I had bought some cupcake boxes about 5 years ago (when I made the first batch of these!) and I decided to go ahead and use them, depsite the plastic I would never buy these days. I feel terribly guilty, the same way I do when using bags for flower brooches or sending things in jiffy packaging, but these things were bought in bulk in the early days of The Linen Cat (I have been selling and making since 2009 now) and I will use up the plastic I already have but won’t buy more. The alternative is to throw it away and that seems more wasteful.
The originals were made as a big Halloween themed bunch of designs back in 2014 (see 
The applique pieces came already beaded and were slightly 3D in style; the whole purse was based on Victorian mourning dress, specifically inspired by an antique dress I own.
By the time I made the second batch in 2015 I couldn’t get the same applique, so I bought a new design and beaded them myself (this made sense as I had to double stitch the beading on all of the first ones anyway, I was paranoid they might come off otherwise).
I was always a bit sad that they had an orange red lining as in my mind they needed blood red, hence the ‘Vampire’ purse name, but I had quite a bit of the silk to use up. I still love them though and I kept one for myself, it is by far the most used item from the shop.
This time, I got to indulge in my need for that blood red lining.
Yum. I love it!…..I may need to keep another for myself.
Gluing in the frames nearly killed me – I’d forgotten how much I hate that job.
But they are done and are listed 
Gosh, they went quickly! Some have already sold as I was writing this post.
Another re-make but one that’s always popular are the red rose brooches,
they are back too.
The witch mice from the original Halloween makes never sold well 😦 and the last couple have gone into the 
There’s a single vampire boy left too.
Whilst I’m in the mood, I’ve started on new spider purses for next year. I’m just re-drafting the pattern and annoyingly I will need to polish up the acrylic bodies of the spiders as they’ve turned up a bit scratched, which just won’t do.
After a lot of thought, I fell in love with the idea of a glass display cabinet, ideally full of rows of my shoes. Yes, shoes again. I have a lot of them. To be fair I’ve been collecting them for years and years it’s very rare these days that I spend any money on myself, but the joy of my liking retro style heals is they never go out of fashion (as they are rarely in fashion!).
I spent a lot of time hunting on eBay for the perfect piece at the right price. The big problem is obviously no-one is willing to deliver glass so I got very excited when I found a cabinet on a charity auction site with postage costs and at a very reasonable price. It was in a bit of a state so was going to be a gamble, but the low price meant it wouldn’t be disastrous if it didn’t work out.
It was delivered by Parcelforce (I’m not kidding!) wrapped in a lot of bubble wrap and cardboard but survived intact. The wrapping was genius, if I remember correctly.
The first job was to try and revive the very scratched woodwork. For this, I went old school, and rubbed it down with an oil and vinegar mix and wow! 
What a difference it made. It was an almost miraculous recovery. It was so long ago that I’m not fully sure, but I think I then gave it two coats of Danish Oil before hunting down some old lock escutcheons on eBay. They were very cheap and once they arrived, I liked the bakelite one best.
As the door stayed shut nicely, I just added a modern brass rabbit knob instead of trying to find a replacement key for the lock….just look at how pretty the wood looks in comparison to the top eBay sale photos.
There is a matching rabbit used as a knob on the eaves cover just to the left. I used up all my leftover brass furniture handles and knobs on the eaves doors, so it’s quite nice as they are mostly mismatched, which I like; it was coincidence these two ended up near each other.
I love this piece of furniture. It cost very little and works really well to fill the dark space as it allows light to pass through, is quite shallow in depth and, most importantly, I get to put pretty things on display!
The light on top came from 
These were the original pictures in the space, but I’d promised myself that one treat when the room was complete would be buying new images as pay off for all the hard work (these ones have gone somewhere else – the wedding photo was my 18th birthday gift from my Mum, she found it in an antique shop and knew I’d like it, the tapestry was stitched by my Gran and used to be in my bedroom when I was a kid).
The two framed photos are from 
Vogue Early September 1960 by Don Honeyman
and Felt and velvet mandarin hat by John French. They would really be nicer as larger images but I had to stay smaller to fit in the space.
The final thing to go on the wall is a little frame with some of my vintage brooches on.
It’s just a cheap photo frame from Sainsbury’s taken apart and a chunk of cork board covered with white linen put back in where the glass should be. It allows me to display my brooches but also take them down easily to wear and the sparkle from the stones is really nice in the darkened corner.
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