This series of keychains all began when I made a tiny mouse for my youngest son and he decided he just HAD to have a house for it to go everywhere with him. Then it became a viral hit with all of his preschool friends and soon everyone had a different colored mouse with their favorite mouse house design dangling from their backpacks.
The mouse that fits inside the keychain is the No-Sew Scrap Mouse by StringyDingDing. It’s a free pattern on her blog. Please go check it out even if you don’t want to make a keychain for it to live inside. I’m pretty sure the mice would also make awesome cat toys too if you leave out the plastic eyes.
The original food themed keychains I designed and started selling locally last year didn’t have buttons. The opening is just big enough to put a mouse inside and take it out again without any chance of it accidentally falling out. However, I had a lot of customers just buying the keychains without mice to use for ear buds and other small things. I felt it was necessary to update the design to add a button for more security. This pattern is written with the button loops but obviously you can leave out that part if you don’t want your little one to have to bother with buttons.
And of course you need to see an example of a mouse in a house.
This year brought a new suggestion by my always imaginative youngest son who is constantly trying to convince me to add more friends to his already overwhelming collection of “bed friends”. He suggested these would make fun amigurumi friends too. So I designed little arms and legs and made a modification to the pattern to make dolls instead of empty little mouse houses.
Who knew a pair of eyes and some limbs would make it so cute?
I hate sewing limbs so I designed it to be no-sew-work-the-limbs-in-as-you-go. I also gave exact placement instructions for the eyes because I hate reading a pattern that says “use your judgement”. These are as straight forward guaranteed that you should get the same results as me kind of patterns.
I don’t have any idea really of exactly how much yarn these take. I think I can usually get 3 out of a single 30g ball of acrylic yarn from my local 100 yen shop (I’m in Japan in case you didn’t know, lol). So basically I’ll just say they might be able to be made from scraps.
What I CAN tell you is to use the same weight of yarn and hook for the mice and mouse house keychains to ensure a comfortable fit.
It takes time to do photo shoots and type up patterns and run them trough testing with crochet volunteers. So it might take a bit to slowly add all the variations we have so far. But I will keep adding the links to each post so you can easily find them.
