The spear mice advance!

The archers are all in place and the spears are advancing towards battle.

Deploy the archers!

The mice have finished their fortifications and are sending out the archers!

Mouse castles!

I've transferred the pattern and made a good start on the stitching. The blue mice have their castle and the red mousies are soon to follow. I'm liking how the design is stitching up. I went with DMC cotton floss for this one, since it's for kids and silk seemed a bit overboard. Ok, silk seemed like a fabulous idea, but one of my friends called "reality check" on me and was correct. The cotton is looking good, so I am happy.

Now that the project planning is done and I've actually started, I wanted to give a shout out to the awesome blog "Got Medieval" which inspired the design for this project. I was looking around for a cute little pastoral scene for a kid's project and remembered the epic mouse versus cat marginalia battle. I've wanted to do something fun with it for a while, so I seized the opportunity. I didn't have enough stitching space to do the poor, defeated kitties artistic justice, but that may just be another chapter in their sad tale. Here is the thread of the tale of the cats versus mice.

• He Hates Meeces to Pieces
• Revenge of the Stripey Kitties
• This Post Doesn’t End Well

Sneak peek on the mice

I've got quite a bit of project posting to catch up on, but here is a sneak peek at what I'm working on. The design is taken from the mice versus cats marginalia in British Library MS Harley 6563. It's a 14th century English Book of Hours. The images can be found here