The Tale of Mousie

Once upon a time there was a mosaic teacher whose students were all busy with their own projects, so she picked up a piece of wire and started twisting it into an egg shape. And the egg shape had a sort of tail. So she bent the tail up and it looked kind of cute. She kept mushing the egg shape around and squishing it and then wrapped it with wet plaster gauze and smoothed it out and let it dry until it hardened, and then she covered it in a couple of layers of some finely ground cementlike stuff called Winterstone - because when you glue mosaic pieces onto a form, it has to be absolutely rigid so the grout doesn't crack.

Now, this mosaic teacher was already getting the idea that this thing was starting to look like a little mouse, so she remembered that she had a very tiny amount of some pink Van Gogh tile in tiny 1/8" squares, and she thought that would make a super mouse belly, and because green is pink's complement and also because dark green makes a good camouflage for a mouse scurrying around on the forest floor, she picked out a dark bluish-green glass for the mouse's back. Because it was a sort of abstract mouse, and because she had some tiny gold beads on a string lying around, she decided to wind them around the tail all the way up so she could practice how to do that, not having much experience with beads. She consulted with her friend Diane Sykes, master bead wrangler extraordinaire, about whether to start at the top or the bottom, and received expert advice - definitely the bottom, said Diane!

The mosaic teacher rummaged around in her vast collection of buttons and things and found a couple of, I think they are tie tacks, to glue on for eyes, and cut a small black bead in half for a nose, and by this time a few weeks had gone by and the students were noticing what was going on and one of them said, Well, he's got to have ears! And the mosaic teacher said, Well, not really, it's an abstract thing, but they insisted, so she

rummaged around again and found a couple of very tiny translucent shells and she had to admit they were totally perfect ears, and then before anyone could say, What about feet? she found two springs that go into the sides of picture frames - and Mousie was complete.