Bright Silk Christmas Mice

Quite some time ago, I made little mice for Christmas, based on a vintage pattern that I had made when I was a kid.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 🙂 ).

I had an image in my mind of white linen mice (the original ones were tweed) in bright silk skirts, no boys this time and I was quite fixed on blue and orange colours with something else for the third (hot pink?), channeling a tin of Quality Street for colour inspiration or maybe my newer love, Lindt truffles.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.

The first two girls were looking good, I was very pleased. I swapped out the bright white linen (as it looked wrong) for some oatmeal linen and added gold ric-rac for extra bling.

Then I realised what the little mice really reminded me off – Cinderella mice!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 here.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.

Right, back to sewing something less jolly, probably back to the black spider purses as I’d like to get them finished too 🙂 I’m on a roll – ha ha!

Random thing  but my laptop is stuck on often doing two spaces….I think I might have got some food crumbs under the keyboard, that’ll teach me to show more respect. It’s driving me nuts, though!