This makes 4/5 animals we have that have cozied up into the DIY cat hammock I made under a dining room chair last year. (Last year?? Time flies.)
Rico!
If you haven’t seen the super easy tutorial, go here.
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It can be done!
On Saturday, some strange urge built inside me to use up my old unused t-shirts for good instead of evil (err, or instead of giving them to Goodwill, but let’s face it, no one wants an old promotional Shoppers Drug Mart t-shirt from the Optimum card’s 10-year anniversary, and if they do, I won’t be party to it).
Upon searching Pinterest, it became apparent that there are about a million ways to recycle old shirts. I love this age we live in. Recycling, upcycling, whatever you want to call it, is the coolest thing there is, especially since today everything we buy is either disposable or regarded to be.
There are a billion rug tutorials but since I’m only good at sewing horribly, I chose a no-sew option.
Before you begin, if you do choose to begin, a word of warning:
You wouldn’t think weaving old lady rugs is dangerous to your body, but if you have even the slightest weakness in your back and you plan for this rug to have no lumps or bumps, you’ll need to lay it flat on a table or floor. Even sitting on a dining room chair at the table was incredibly painful to my back, twisting it up real well. The first night (yes, this is a craft that will probably take you more than one night to complete, unless you’re a born weaver), I couldn’t sleep for two hours. Eventually I found my hot water bottle and after about a half hour of lying on it, I got some sleep. The next day, I had to actually work with the hot water bottle propped between the chair and my back if I didn’t want to cry out in pain every few seconds.
This weaving stuff is serious business. You really begin to feel for those Chinese workers who get paid about half a cent per Kathy Lee Gifford shirt or whatever the hell. I am not exaggerating, I thought I would need a doctor’s visit, and I’ve never known the true miracle of a hot water bottle until I tried weaving. Maybe work on your core muscles for a year before giving it a whirl.
[End warning.]
So before learning of the pain that would befall me, I had to make t-shirt yarn. What, you might ask, the hell is t-shirt yarn? It’s strips of t-shirts, about 1-3 inches wide and stretched out like crazy then balled up like yarn so that your cat doesn’t play with the mess of string resulting. You use this recycled yarn to weave your old lady rag rug.
Luckily, the love of my life (aw) had gotten me some crafting supplies for Christmas, so making t-shirt yarn was simple.
I used a rotary cutter, a giant self-healing cutting mat, and the giant ruler that came with the mat, but that’s not necessary.
Rather than duplicate someone else’s content, here is the tutorial I followed to make the yarn. It’s awesome.
Note: You can also use sleeves if you start to run out of a colour you like and you have long sleeves. I used short sleeves as well, and it gave me a fair amount, just make sure you’re cutting at a 90 degree angle to the crease for it to work.
Then I followed this wicked good tutorial to make my rug from the yarn. I’m so thankful to people who make instructional posts like this. It was much easier than it initially looked, although it did require some concentration and re-weaving at times.
When all was said and done (a day and a half and a lot of dedication later, interrupted many times over by laundry and puppy training), I had an ugly old lady rug that I now love.
Here are some glamour shots:
For ugliness sans-dirt purposes only. Wipe your feet on this rug and I will cry.
It looks great and it feels great. Like everything you ever wanted in a recycled t-shirt rug.
And it really works too! (Demonstrated in B&W because when these rugs were popular, this is how your grandmother would have shown it off on Instagram. They only had B&W filters then, and they weren’t even called Willow and Inkwell yet.)
So there you have it. Although it temporarily destroyed my back to make, maybe some Wii Fit will cure what ails me and I can crank out some more again soon.
Have you made one of these or anything similar? I’d love to see it.
Ever wonder how to bathe your cat without having your eyes scratched out of their eye-holes?
Like most cats, Rico’s biggest fear is water. Well, when you have a cat who sheds day-in/day-out who hasn’t had a bath in say, years, and he’s been staying up nights to meow you awake lately, it seems to me that indicates it’s bath time. And you know what? This cat of mine did surprisingly well, aside from the fact he’s been licking himself for an hour since. A vast improvement from the “nearly murdering me” experiences of every time before. As such, I decided to make this a learning experience for all.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED:
- Patience and a calm voice
- Sleeves
- Garden gloves or other protective thick gloves that won’t ruin with water
- Pet-friendly shampoo
- Two buckets or a double sink
- Copious amounts of old (but clean) towels
- Camera (wet cat pictures are hilarious)
We have a double-sink in our kitchen, but I’ve also read about using two buckets. Fill each one about half way with slightly warmer than room temperature water, one sink with soapy water, one with fresh for dipping and rinsing clean. At the bottom place a towel or other surface they can grip if they get scared. The less sliding around and flailing of kitty legs, the better.
Rico being bathed / Chupacabra in the laundry room
Warning: Don’t run the water while the cat is around, and especially not while you’re bathing him/her, as you might with a dog.
Cats are different in that running water will terrify them and you’re bound to lose their trust forever afterward.
Next, put on your personal protective equipment (PPE) for your own health and safety.
This is the second most important thing I learned in business school, besides “I shouldn’t have gone to business school”. I recommend, for the kitty-bathing, a raincoat and garden gloves. Works like a charm. I didn’t get scratched once.
You also want to have two (2) spare towels nearby to dry kitty with if he doesn’t run off right away. I say two, because Rico flailed once and pulled a ‘drying’ towel into the sink with him. Luckily I had a helper named Miklos to grab me a second towel.
If you can close the room off and keep other pets away, all the better.
It’s all in the soft dip.
While supporting the cat’s bottom half, and sort of cradling his top half in the crook of your arm, dip him slowly into the soapy water. If the cat won’t let you dip him as much as you need to, you can lather him up with the soap while he is dipped.
Speak soothingly. Be calm. There were times when Rico flailed and wanted to kill me, but the towels at the bottom of the sink for him to grip subdued this a bit, as did the fact that I didn’t freak out along with him.
Again: Don’t turn on the tap.
When you switch the cat to the fresh water, cradle gently, speak quietly to kitty. When you have successfully dipped into the clean water, slowly bring water up with your available hand (the one you lowered his/her bottom half in with) to rinse kitty off. The cat may panic at this point.
Stay calm, try and resist the urge to let the cat jump out of your arms and run away. Your raincoat and gloves should protect you from this, and if using a sink, the fact that you’re not leering down at the poor soul from 4 feet above will help too. Once the cat is nicely rinsed, you can lift him out and onto a towel, wrapping him in it, and fluffing him up a bit before he darts with humiliation into the basement or closet.
Snap a great picture or two. Leave your link for me in the comments.
Voila. Clean kitty, too busy licking himself all night long to meow and wake you up, and smelling fresh as a daisy to boot.
If you’ve tried this method, were you successful? Don’t you find bathing a cat hilarious? Let me know in the comments.
Cats love to sleep. One common bed you’ve probably seen at SPCAs and cat rescues is the cat hammock. When I saw this cat hammock on Pinterest today, I thought “what a great idea for a cat hammock at home.”
We had tried putting them in Casey’s old crate before, but for some reason the cats didn’t like the idea of walking into a metal cage. Maybe I could’ve thought that one through better.
So I thought, good idea! A cozy option they’ll enjoy without paranoia I’ll slam the door closed and ship them off somewhere. We don’t have a chair like the one on Pinterest, so the next best thing seemed to be underneath the dining room table, shoved into the back corner that no one sees. The cats love hanging out under there like creeps.
Since I’m cheap, I decided to make my own from the crate cat hammock experiment gone wrong.
What I used:
- A chair with supports under the legs, like the one shown below
- A sheet, cut in half and folded
You’ll need a chair with leg supports.
Ah! Those sheet-tying skills!
I took one half-sheet, folded, and began twisting and tying the four corners of it around the chair legs above the supports.
There was no method to tying as you can probably tell. Each sheet corner was either wrapped around or triple-tied around a leg above the support, and as long as the cat wouldn’t be on the ground once in the hammock, I was satisfied.
The last bit of the sheet wouldn’t stay tied to a leg, so I tied it around the adjacent supports instead.
When done, I took the other half-sheet, fluffed it up and used it as a cushion inside the hammock.
Mixi watched the undertaking of this project, which I think helped. She hopped into it soon after I put the chair back behind the table. About an hour later, I found her in it again. That’s two times more than they ever used the crate cat hammock. Success!
Check out this paparazzi shot I got of her:
As you can see, it doesn’t need to be perfect, only functional (and out of the way so it’s not a spectacle). Only cut my finger once on a staple sticking out from underneath the chair. It was worth it!
Update! (December 5 2012)
Look who I found in the hammock today:
Two cats looking grumpy (due to using camera phone flash) in the new hammock = Cat hammock success!
One more update! (March 20 2013)
You may have already seen from newer entries that our new puppy Junior found his way in…
But here’s a new face, leaving our lab Casey the only pet who hasn’t found her way in yet (which might be a challenge, as she’s almost 90 lbs):
Rico!
Of course, if you like the idea of a hammock but don’t have a sheet lying around, you can always buy something like this on Amazon for about $12.
Have you made one of these hammocks yourself yet? How do your pets like them?
About a month ago, Miklos got sick of the tiny width of our driveway. He went hog-wild and tore down the fence between our driveway and our neighbour’s house. He used that for a project and then had a bunch of scrap wood left over.
On the same rampage, he took our old metal garbage shed to the scrapyard. The thing was lousy and made a cringe-worthy metal-on-metal scraping sound when you opened its doors, so no harm done except for one problem: Every windy day, I would wake up to our garbage bins clattering around the stone patio.
When he told me he was going to build a garbage shed out of the scrap wood from the fence, we both envisioned Homer’s spice rack.
It turned out we were both wrong, but I’m convinced that we’d have built something of that caliber if I were involved.
He used:
- Approximately seven 2x2s
- Hinges/handles shed kit which neither of us knew existed
- Shingles
- Roofing nails
- Wood nails
- Retractable knife with hook blades
- Barrel bolt set because he didn’t like the lock that came in the shed kit
- This idea
He built side panels first, starting from scratch with the wood boards he had left from the fence. I don’t know many people who are good with computers and also good with making things, but Miklos is one of them.
Before long, that garbage wood became a garbage shed:
BEFORE
(By the way, do you know how much fun it was on a freezing cold day ripping every nail out of these boards? You should try it!)
AFTER
Yay! It rained! And it’s shingled!
It’s a vast improvement from the hunk of metal which once sat in that spot. Not bad for a programmer. What do you think?
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