Make a cute mouse egg cosy

These are the cutest egg cosies I've ever seen and you can 
buy them at the Open Air Museum in Lyngby, which is well worth a visit.

If you live on another continent, or fancy a couple of hours sewing, you can follow
 in our footsteps and have a shot at sewing something similar. 

Cut out a shape roughly like this. Mice are all different sizes -
they just nibble their mouseholes a bit bigger to fit,
so exact measurements are not a problem ;o)
Just make sure that the lower edge of the fleece is long enough to go right
round the fattest part of the egg cup and leave a bit for a seam down the side.

This is what ours looked like. Fleece is great because you don't need to
hem edges, it's stretchy but firm to sew and you can trim ears as you go along. Eeek,

This is the point when Jake took the raw egg we were using as a pattern and
tried to demonstrate some law of physics he'd seen in a video.
That's why the table is shiny wet and I had to wipe down my machine.
In his defence, yes, I believe raw eggs are strong if you push top to bottom
but NOT if you squeeze them round the middle! Yuck! 

Now that's all cleared up, back to the mouse. Sew a seam
down one side and across the other shoulder.
Fold the nose back, as shown, and sew the two sides.
 Trim the ears rounder, see above. 

You can see the lines where the stitching are better in this photo.
One shoulder poked out more than the other, so we ended up running a
 seam of stiching down that side too at the end to even things out.

Now take a deep breath Mr Mouse as we turn the nose inside out
and then tuck it into the neck hole. 

Push it right down until the whole nose is inside the body
with the edges meeting at the top of the neckhole.
(Like you do when sewing a sleeve into a shirt).

There will be pleats/bunched up bits but that will all be under his chin, and most
 of us have a few spare chins tucked away under there. I stitched this by hand as it was a bit fiddly.

In the very foreground of the picture above, you can see what will
be the top of the head and the ears each side.
DON'T SEW THESE BITS TOGETHER YET! 

Now turn the mouse the right way out by pushing the nose right into the body
and pulling the body down until the seams are hidden inside.
Now push the ears through the holes and run a line of stitching around the base of one ear,
around the back of the neck and around the base of the other ear (see above).
When you gather this stitching slightly, it will shape the head and ears.  

Now we sewed on button eyes and a popper-stud nose.
Then Jake stuffed the head with offcuts of fleece
and other grey matter to pad out the head.
Brainy.

Jake thought this photo was really blurred...

So he took this much better one instead. Complete with whiskers and a smile.

The perfect dipper eggs take 5 minutes exactly from when the eggs are lowered gently
into the bubbly water - by a grown up.

HAVE FUN!

This little piggy at the Open Air Museum

Through this gateway lies a fairytale land of old houses to explore - each one carefully taken apart brick-by-brick and rebuilt at this Open Air Museum just outside Lyngby. 

For this expedition, I had to enrol the help of Anika and Toran Brown - and a couple of friendly horses -
for photos, because Jake was back at school and the deadline was looming.
If you look very hard, you can see one of my big brothers, Alex, with a beard standing at the back of the cart but his wife Clare is tucked out of sight. 

As soon as the driver got aboard, it was giddy up and we set off on a lovely horse-and-cart ride around the
enchanting site set in 12 acres of land to see what it had to offer. 

We passed quite a few of the over 100 quaint old houses...

...which had windows I want to paint (on canvas).

And when our tour by horse and cart was over, I walked back to try and find the sneaky pig I christened Trixie
whose phantom pregnancy had ensured her a cushy number in hog heaven.
I poked my head inside some houses to see the tools and baby equipment on display from centuries ago.

Handles at both end? For mum and dad, I guess - see who can push the strongest?

Many of the houses had notices like this one outside explaining who had
lived there and what they did for a living.

The horses passed me again and the driver smiled and said, yes, I was on the right road
to find the HUGE pig I'd seen from the cart earlier.

First I found a this little piggy in the market for some grub,

Then this little piggy who stayed home.
One spotty piggy who had roast beef
 and another dotty piggy who had none

Then finally I found this GIGANTIC HAPPY PIGGY who went grunt grunt grunt but
couldn't be bothered to even get up let alone run wee wee all the way home!

Even though home was just over there.

Luckily on the way back I passed the waterfall where just minutes before a
 whole horde of children had been playing so I'm not
contravening any privacy laws with this photo. It DID look fun.

AND OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS

We'll be posting more photos of the houses, animals and shop where we bought these cute egg cosies.

This weekend, we'll be making our own egg cosies out of some grey fleece that was once
intended to be an elephant costume for the Danish Faste Lavn celebrations
many years ago.
It's up in the loft. Probably hidden away in a trunk somewhere ;o)

so WATCH THIS SPACE!