All of the gigantic mice are present and accounted for. They were all quite happy to pose for the Rainbow Scrappy Challenge mid-year celebration and brought some of their baby mice along. Apparently baby mice only come in secondary colors and not primary. Odd.

Making the tails on the large mice still causes me more grief than I would like to admit to. I started out with an improv tail for the pink mouse, but made and used a template for the rest. Except I think that the seam allowance or something is off so the tails have not come together as nicely as I might like. Then I saw this amazing (and now obvious!) tip by Susan Jacuone in Workshops from Quiltskills, the Quilters' Guild of Australia. Take a paper template of the finished curved piece--in this case the mouse tail and its background components--then sew by machine around the finished edge to mark out your personal seam allowance.

And here is a closeup of some of the kittens. Needless to say, they won't stop play fighting and rolling around, even for their photograph. No wonder Tommy can't give these kittens away. But as you can see, when they play they make more interesting patterns than they would if I tried to keep them apart with sashing. (To see the entire flock of cranes, you can jump to this post.)