Of Mice and Valar

The pins arrived yesterday!! I still haven't been able to look at them all; I spent all day at my desk yesterday, putting together the school work for next week, and giving feedback on what the students sent me last week. I just managed to rip open the box and grab two of each, just to convince myself that they'd turned out wonderfully. 

It's weird - since the first pins I ever made (you remember the zombie smurfs), the feeling of opening a box of new pins has gradually shifted from fear and apprehension to complete happiness and delight. I was so excited for these ones - I just couldn't wait for them to arrive, so much so that waiting for them had become a permanent emotion somewhere with the rest of what I was feeling at any given time. And when I saw them yesterday, there was no surprise at all. Just the feeling of "Of course, what ELSE would they look like?" I'm so happy with the colours too, and the different skin tones! 

I will hopefully find the time to grade the pins over the next week, and they will be in my shop over the next week. Still watching the Deutsche Post website, but still no shipping to the US or Canada. :/

And I finally did the last of the dormice! 

Dungeons & Dormice: The Druid 

Druids are among the most respected (and well-fed) people in Dormousedom. They know all the incantations for every shrub and tree (those that matter, anyway), how to make their branches grow into thickets, how to reduce their thorns, and most importantly of all, how to speed up the ripening of berries. If you have ever stood at a raspberry or bramble bush with fat ripe berries, and you could have sworn that the fruits were all green and tiny when you walked this way yesterday, that was most certainly the work of a Dormouse Druid.