17 little mice

Greetings from the Mouse Factory!

Well, not quite, but I have been making lots of mice lately, as I was trying to get as many as possible done for Ompelukerho (a Finnish women's action group I am a member of) stand at the Christmas market. The market is today, and I hope they sell well! They did last year, anyway, and because these mice are smaller than the ones last year, they might even sell better (as last year's mice were more like rats...)

Pattern: Mice from Donna Druchunas' book Kitty Knits. Donna was nice enough to let me knit mice from her pattern for charity sale, as long as I mention her name and the name of her book. That's why the mice all have tags on them!
Yarn: Schachenmayr Ecologico color, two balls for 17 mice!
Needles: two 6mm dpns
Modifications: I made most of the mice smaller than Donna's pattern calls for. I only increased until I had 16 stitches across, made the body shorter, started the ears before decreasing towards the nose, and made the ear bobbles with 4 stitches instead of five. I generally tried a lot of variations out, and some of the mice really look funny with their huge ears or very short bodies! But I hope the cats will love them. The mice are filled with local sheep's bum wool (=wool sheared close to the sheeps butt), apparently cats love that wool! It was given to me by someone at my knit night after I mentioned I'm knitting cat toys. The eyes are sewn with some black sock yarn I had in my stash.

I really love making the mice, and the thought that they will be of use to animals twice, once as a loved toy, second time as a means to collect some money for abandoned animals, makes the knitting twice as fun. I'm sure to make more next year!