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!  

Finally, the Paverpol culture vultures and course dates and times

A bit later than expected due to a dead computer but here we go...

Susanne will be holding a weekend of Paverpol classes this autumn for children aged about 10 or over with a mum, dad or other adult. Yippee! It takes some concentration but is great fun.

Paverpol course dates: Saturday 12 and 13 September
Price: one day DKK 400 per person
          two days DKK 650 per person

Sign up by mailing her at sussdesign@gmail.com

Here are some beautiful ladies made by one of Susanne's friends.

Here are our finished vultures!
And below, you can see how we made them.

Silver foil, an old wire frame from a dead pot plant (very apt), an old sheet from
Halloween, masking tape and garden wire are some of the things we took along
for a two-day course with our friend Susanne. 

And while jake was making his Sith Warrior figure, I began trying to figure out
what on earth I was going to make 

It took a lot of wire winding, two branches and some tape to start
 holding it together. 

But something was wrong. This was far too elegant for my garden.

So I started giving the bird a hunch back. That's better.
Susanne explained that you have to try to fill in the bulk of the sculpture 
before swathing it in strips of sheet dipped in Paverpol.

I used some old cables. Suddenly I caught sight of a microphone on the end of one - once I'd firmly knotted it into place. It said 'Creative' on it, which rang a bell. Hmmm that was a programme installed on one of my computers. One of the ones you can't remember what it's for - a camera? A free game? Well, now the mystery was solved. Too late to save it now though. 

I look like Obi Wan strangling a Star Wars chicken. 

The second day Jake had finished his and went to play with his dad,
so I had to rig up a stand to hold my birds while I slathered them in Paverpol - without getting any on the floor.

And here they are. Complete with drawer handle eyes. Of course now the drawers in my office are not complete but that just means that getting into my drawers is even harder :o). 

And here is a far more appealing Kiwi bird too, made with seaweed.

Here is a doll given a new lease of life in the garden.

Another bird but MUCH BIGGER than ours.

Playing with Paverpol glue with our friend Susanne

Here is the Star Wars Sith Jake made.

And here's how he made it..

As well as the garden (Bonzai) wire to make the figure's skeleton...

You'll need an old sheet, silver foil, a 1 ltr tub of Paverpol.

The rest of the stuff was used on
my vultures, which will be on the blog next week

First Jake and Susanne made the body out of wire.

Then Jake padded it out with silver foil.

When that was done, he cut strips of old sheet up - about 2 inches wide
by six inches long (though I've lived with centimeters and the
24-hour clock long enough to mix up measurements and end up with a an unhappy medium).

Luckily Paverpol is not an exact science.

And then he dipped the strips of sheet in the Paverpol liquid glue,
scraped off the excess and
wound them around the wire frame.

In between layers, he used my hair drier to help speed up the process.
My hair drier will never be the same but it was all in a good cause.
And my hair does what it wants, regardless of hair driers, anyway.

It took two to put on the cape.

Sith still. 

Then come the ticklish bits. Jake built up very small layers
of sheet to make eyebrows and a nose.
The spikes are tiny twigs. They are called something cooler than 'spikes' but Jake has gone to bed, so I can't refer to a higher authority.

The light sabre is a longer twig.

And then he wound some sheeting round a wire fixed to a base that
Susanne had prepared in advance. Cool!

And the finishing touch was to add some silver paint. It took about 4.5 hours altogether and is an excellent present for Jake's big brother, Alex, who is also a true Star Wars fan.

NEXT WEEK
See how my vultures took shape :o). See what sensible people made.
And see when you can sign up for a parent and kiddy Paverpol fun day with Susanne in the autumn. (She hasn't quite finalised the dates yet).

Flea markets - pimp that mug

You will need:

A mug

Nail varnish

A fairly big old tub (from ice cream, perhaps)

NEWSPAPER

These mugs were only DKK 15 for four at our local flea market. 

Great. But being exactly the same, they were far too easy 

to muddle up. And there's nothing worse than getting a mouthful of someone ELSE's cold tea, complete with soggy biscuit dunking dregs. Yuck! 

Luckily I had some old nail varnish, and Louis was visiting. Yay!

We didn't have an old plastic tub so we used a plastic bag in a basket.
First we filled the bag with warm water - not right up to the top.
Then we dripped some drops (or dropped some drips) of two similar
colours of varnish into the water.
THIS WAS WHERE WE REMEMBERED THE NEWSPAPER
just in case.

Now hold onto the mug carefully at the top - by the handle works well -
and dip the mug down into the water.
The varnish sticks to the sides of the mug and makes pretty patterns.

They dripped more varnish into the bag before each new mug.
It LOOKS like Jake is dipping his fingers in the water
but that would be a dippy idea. 

And this as the prettiest mug we made.
Of course they have to be washed by hand but as there's
no dish washer at our old summer cottage, it doesn't matter!
Anyway, the boys earn pocket money for flea markets by helping wash up.
At least then their hands are clean :o)

HOPE YOURS WORKS!