hooses for mooses and spiders in hats

Behold, a regular old tin of mints.  Open it up and...

What's this?  A teeny-tiny bed for a...

...mouse, a mouse in a peppermint striped dress.

 Here she is, tucked up in her bed.

This is one of my makes from last year that I couldn't share until Christmas was past, for fear of ruining surprises.  Not that my youngest niece, Elsie (nearly 3), reads my blog, but her mum does and sometimes it's nice for parents to get a surprise too.  I was a bit sad to part with this mouse.  Like most things I make from my imagination, she didn't turn out quite how I'd pictured (for example, she only has red shoes because I made her too tall for the tin and had to hack her feet off!) but I hope you'll agree she's lovely nonetheless.

I didn't make as many handmade gifts this year, so Elsie was the only one to get something handmade from her auntie.  It wasn't favouritism, just that her older brother and sisters have had lots of handmade presents over the years but Elsie, arriving so close to Dulcie, has kind of missed out on that.  I try to make amends whenever I can.

One of Elsie's unique selling points is her passionate love of spiders.  I'd got Christmas decorations for all her siblings (including an amazing dinosaur bauble from Designosaur for my nephew) but couldn't find a Christmas spider anywhere.  Surprising, huh?  Ha!  So I decided to crochet one.

I used this pattern and learned an amazing invisible decrease in the process.  It really is invisible, even on a black spider with white stuffing.  I wish I'd known about it when I made Dulcie's Foxy.  The Santa hat I just ad-libbed.  This is why I love crochet - I'm a relative beginner and yet I can ad-lib a Santa hat in a jiffy.

Mr Spider hung around on our Christmas tree for a while before we wrapped him up.  I was a bit sad to part with him, but it seemed only fair that he went to live with the spider lover in our lives :)