Kitty Crafts

I may or may not have mentioned this yet, but we have a new addition to our family this year:

Don't let that adorable face fool you...this furball is a complete brat! But he is our little brat and we love him. We adopted him from the local animal shelter several months ago; he had been picked up as a stray (but was obviously someone's pet since he still had rubber caps on his claws), and had been there almost 3 weeks when we met him.

It was definitely a rough transition there for a while...at a year old, he came with a few bad habits that we've been working to break. The first made it obvious why his previous owners had capped his claws - he loves to scratch everything. Correction: he loved to scratch everything but the kitty scratchers I bought for him. His favorites were the couch (which he claimed as his in the first 5 minutes of being brought home), and the upholstered seats on our bar-height dining room chairs.

 

Since he's one of the longer cats I've known, I thought a nice tall cat scratcher was in order...until I saw the prices! I knew I could make one just as good for less with some hot glue, rope, and some kind of stand. A quick trip to Lowe's led me to the carpet section, where they sweetly gave me one of the huge cardboard tubes for free, along with some carpet scraps they used to make samples. I had the lidded wine box at home already - Total Wine sells them for $5 and I had purchased all they had with the intention of making shelves, but they turned out to be better for kitty uses than my own! I just attached a section of the tube (fair warning, it takes a long time to cut even with a saw) with some leftover corner brackets from my pantry project. I covered the top of the box (and brackets) with carpet using hot glue, and used hot glue again to start securing the rope for wrapping, and glued it every few rows along the way. I capped the end with a plastic lid from a round container and continued the rope all the way up over until it was finished! I estimate the whole thing cost around $15, and after about a week of patience, gentle corrections, and lots of treats, it's his favorite thing in the house to scratch.

The claw caps are still a must, and we get them online here for about half the price of pet stores.

Some of the other wine crates I had were a bit bigger and made nice beds. I lined this one with a floppy crocheted basket I made ages ago:

This one got a fabric liner, and was apparently tasty:

So if you wonder what I'm doing on any given day...the answer is usually tormenting this furball with snuggles.

More to come, Yellow.