Monday, March 1, 2010

Crocheting for Charity: Cat Toys

My sister-in-law volunteers at a local cat shelter. I wanted to get some cat toys for them, but the shelter doesn't allow toys with cat nip. Could you imagine 166 cats going wild on cat nip? Otherwise, I definitely would have bought quite a few of these. They are so cute and look extrememly well made.
So, I decided to make some cat toys using this pattern and this pattern. I just used some yarn I had around the house, some jingle bells for the mouse's tail and some mylar windows from junk mail envelopes to make the sardines crinkly.

The mouse was super easy and worked up quickly. I wanted to make sure that the jingle ball was secured to the tail very well, so instead of following the instructions, I chained 15 stitches, then switched to a tiny hook (1.9 mm) to insert through the loop at the top of the bell, pull the yarn through and slip stitch. I then switched back to the size G hook and slip stitched back up the remaining chains and sewed the tail to the mouse.

The sardines were easy to make too, although there weren't many instructions for the tail. The instructions tell you to make a circle by crocheting in the round and then attach it to the sardine, but the photo didn't look like there was a circle hanging off of the sardine. So I finished off the circle leaving a long tail, folded the circle in half and sewed it along the edge so that I had a semi-circle. I then sewed the round edge of the semi-circle to the last round of the sardine. I hope the kitties like them :)

1 comment:

Laura Reavis said...

what lucky kitties they will be! Cute toys for them and very clever to reuse the junk mail! Cool!