Two bad mice...

Most of the miniatures from my Canal House have been packed away during my workroom renovation.  A few days ago I started cleaning the house and putting my miniatures back in there.  It is fun to see and handle all of the things I have collected over the years.  A few miniatures are firm favourites of mine.  Like the yellow rubber kitchen gloves.  

I bought the gloves about ten years ago when I first began working on my Canal House.  I always loved those gloves.  Yellow rubber, hollow gloves, just like the real ones.  I did not pack them away with my other miniatures as they are stuck down with wax and they can't break anyway, now can they?   

Have you ever read 'The tale of two bad mice' by Beatrix Potter?   It is one of the earliest books I can remember reading and I always loved it.  Those mice are so cute.  Naughty, but cute.  Unfortunately I think Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb's descendants have found their way into my Canal House.  

Look what they did to my gloves!  They ate my gloves!  After eating one whole finger it must have not been that tasty after all as they then moved on to more promising things.  A box of chocolates (which was filled with sand) and a piece of crisp bread with aniseed sprinkles made from polymer clay.  The aniseed sprinkles are appropriately called 'muisjes' in Dutch, which translates as 'little mice'.  

I doubt that I'll be able to find another pair of these gloves again.  I have never seen them anywhere else.  I'm glad I had stored the rest of my food items in a closed plastic container so the mice didn't touch those.  Poor little things, they must have been pretty hungry to even start eating fake food!

For the past few days I have been in the process of putting all my miniatures back into the house.  I have a few new additions to my kitchen which you have not seen yet.  I put in a small fridge and a butcher's block which I made many years ago for another small project.  The project no longer exists, but I kept the fridge and the butcher's block.  

I think the plans for the fridge came from a magazine.  It even has a light in there but I still need to plug it in.  I should make some eggs for the egg rack.  The pretty auriculas were made by Gill Rawling of Petite Fleur.  I bought those at the Kensington Fair last May.                    

Kim Selwood made the kitchen chairs for me.  I love these.  They are the 'Clisset' ladderback chairs  designed by Ernest Gimson.  Although they are Arts & Crafts chairs, they closely resemble the typical kitchen chairs which could be found in Dutch kitchens for centuries and therefore fit in very well here.  

In trying to keep the dust -and mice!- out of my Canal House, I have now fitted a large sheet of acrylic glass across the front.  If any mice do manage to get in now, I hope they will follow in their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- grandmother's footsteps:  I have left a dust-pan and broom by the back door.