Spring Liberty Hanging Mice

This starts a VERY long time ago with the original hanging mice, made as Christmas ornaments back in 2013. Wow, even I was surprised it was that long ago. Anyway, one of the mice had a skirt made from Liberty Tana Lawn in the Wiltshire berries print and I thought then how sweet a set in other Liberty fabrics would be for a Spring/Summer version.

Skip forward nearly 10 years (10 years!!!!) and I finally got on with it.

I am very precious about my Liberty lawn collection as it costs so much money. I’ve used it in the past as cravats for Wolves, Foxes and Badgers, which seems like a good plan as it involves small amounts serving a highlight purpose against the linen suits, but I have quite a bit stacked in my cupboards and I’m on a mission to use up existing fabrics over buying new. It also seemed like a good way to use up some ric-rac bought originally for egg cosies even longer ago!

I am especially mean with two of the lawns I chose as they came from Japan at great cost but are so perfect that it had to be done. One is the above, no idea of the name, the other is a yellow version of Betsy which is slightly smaller in size than the standard British Liberty Betsy and a colour I have never seen here, I only have a small length of each and they probably cost the same to import as they cost to buy.

I messed up when adding ric-rac to the first mouse and went with pink (cut for the final berry skirt) on the multi-floral cotton when I had planned to use yellow. Doh! I ended up putting a second set of mice together with this anomaly for Folksy, with the others listed on my own website.

Because I am me, I agonised for a very long time about the cape colours and also about the beads used on the fronts. I actually got a bit obsessed about the potential of a coral cape but the company that I buy 100% wool felt from seem to have discontinued it and I do prefer 100% wool, it also would have defeated the point of this being a stash busting exercise. I did buy new beads in a pretty, pink colour.

After coral was ‘out’, I went with a deep pink for the final cape and the same colour version of Wiltshire berry as the original mice.

They were fun to photograph, the German paper egg in the background on the left is the one I was given as a kid with chocolate eggs inside each year. One of my friends used to get a pair of pants in hers – no chocolate! – I remember feeling really sorry for her as this seemed to defeat the point of Easter eggs to me.

The chocolate eggs are from a box of mixed luxury chocolates I was given for my Birthday that just happened to be Easter chocs and had a row of these praline eggs in sweet coloured foil inside. I would quite like to eat them now but might re-take some of the photos as I am slightly depressed to notice that the quality from my old DSLR camera is now probably less than my new phone, but I don’t know how to take decent product photos on my phone yet. Some would argue I don’t know how to take decent photos on either and I would say hush, we can’t all be perfect at everything!

I’m really happy with them. I especially like the dark red ric-rac with the yellow Betsy print, it is quite a grown-up colour combination. They have mostly sold already but I might make a final few to use up the remaining ric-rac as finishing things off always makes me feel content, it’ll annoy me to have a few centimetres left! For now, I need a break from mice.

They are listed here on my website and one set on Folksy.

Linen Rabbit egg cosies next!