Pocket Mice

These are actually from a free pattern by StringyDingDing. She calls them no-sew scrap mouse amigurumi. We renamed them to suit our customers in Japan. The direct link to her pattern is at the bottom of this post.

It’s been nearly two years that I’ve been crocheting these adorable little mice. It all started when my youngest son wanted a tiny friend to play hide and seek the critter with his older brother. Our home is a little too small to play hide and seek with people.

It quickly became apparent that mice do indeed multiply quickly. Little man was picking out ALL the colors he needed. Then we started getting creative making little playsets and just having so much fun!

Then he asked me if he could take one to preschool with him. That’s where we ran into an issue. His preschool only allowed paper toys as they were assumed to have very little money value should they be lost or damaged. BUT all the kids were allowed to have backpack buddies and other kinds of keychains, which the teachers even allowed the kids to unhook and play with. So I needed a keychain that could hold a mouse.

My son for some reason inexplicably liked eggplants at the time. Not for eating, but he liked to collect eggplants. So that was actually the first thing I made.

It was a hit at preschool (youchien in Japan)!

Before I knew it the kids were asking their moms if they could have mice too. I have been participating in our local monthly craft marche so I hurried up and made a bunch of pocket mice so the classmates could come shopping. I only had a few mouse houses, with freshly designed tomato and mikan (mandarin orange) joining the eggplant. I sold out of them immediately too.

The original keychains didn’t have buttons because I designed them to perfectly hold a mouse without it being able to fall out. But then so many people began buying them to hold ear bud headphones and other small things so I thought buttons had become necessary to secure the alternate items.

As I’m typing this post I find myself sadly very low on inventory so I’ll add a mouse house post as I make more to stock up for the marche. We’ll keep this about the mice.

A few months had passed but some of the classmates just couldn’t make it to the marche. But we were going to all get together at a nearby park for a Christmas party of sorts. I decided I was going to make sure every kid got a mouse. But there was already a tiny issue with mice looking too much alike as my son and his best friend mixed up their nearly identical purple mice. So I decided the 28 mice were all going to have Christmas sweaters, no two alike. I wanted the receiving to be completely random so I put each one in a pinched closed toilet paper tube, because don’t all normal people have 28 empty toilet paper tubes just laying around? Hahahaa.

I didn’t think to take pictures until half of them were already packaged but the other half had a darker shade of red and green.

It seem I will always have pocket mice since they are so popular with all the kids of all ages in town. There’s even a 5th grader that comes by each month to buy a couple more to add to her collection. And they are the perfect quick, barely need to pay attention to a pattern any more, kind of take it to go project for me to have handy when running kids to appointments and extracurriculars and such.

I can’t recommend these mice enough! It is so very worth it to make some of your own.
Go check out StringyDingDing to get the pattern for yourself!