My first House Mouse stamp - and doing the happy dance

Tonight I'm doing the happy dance :). Over a year ago I took on a large textile project that had all sorts of problems. The poor thing had been designed by a committee, started and stopped by several groups of people and one individual, all of whom had wildly different styles. A dear friend begged me to complete it as her last resort. I'm sure there are less appealing projects to work on, but I can't think of them off-hand. Anyhow, deadlines came and went and I kept finding every excuse not to work on it. This October is a major anniversary for the chapel it's destined for and for the past month I've been gritting my teeth and working, and working and working on it. When you're thread painting a background it's hard to know when to stop and I phoned for it to be inspected today. I'm so happy to report that it greatly exceeded expectations, luckily my friend understood the limitations and problems. She was delighted with it and took it away to trim it to size and complete it in time for the celebrations. Hooray! I forgot to take any pictures before it went, I was working on it until the last minute, but I'll get photos of it in situ I'm sure. I'm a happy bunny with a weight off my shoulders now it's completed :)

Now back to stamping... Anyhow, I've had a hankering for a House Mouse stamp (or two) and last week I managed to get Peppermint Tails on Ebay for a reasonable price. Since then I've found a couple more and look forward to them arriving. I wanted a soft effect and wasn't confident enough to use Copics on the image, so I used good old watercolour pencils, edging the image with Distress Ink. When I looked at the House Mouse Challenge site they are reviewing the year and you can choose one or several of the challenges they've had over the last year. I've combined their very useful sketch from Challenge #48 with #32, Something Sweet (peppermint tails) and #14 All About Christmas.

I bought the yummy Christmas papers at Stamp Attic last night (they're Fancy Pants), the velvet ric-rac came from Festival of Quilts and the sentiment is from Imagepac I think. Love the classic colours of the papers and the image :)