Mad Hair Day

Okay, more insane.

I felt guilty, of course, as I do over all my abandoned projects. And then, just to make me feel even worse, our ginger tom got himself injured, probably in a fight with a possum (evil little bastards) and developed a hideous abcess. We were alerted to this painfully early one morning by my daughters, clamouring “Mummy, Clyde has a hole in his fur and his insides are outside and they are all pink!”

Hundreds of dollars of surgery later, he came home, somewhat wobbly and wonkily stitched, to recuperate in his very own lovely cat bed. Guilt, what guilt?

Here’s how to knit a cat bed in under two hours!

First of all, dig up the Gigantic Ugly Sheep Sweater that you have been hiding in the back of the closet for two years. Okay, so this was one I prepared earlier, but it still counts! I did knit it myself!

You will also need two manky old bed pillows. You know, the kind you have lurking in the back of the airing cupboard and drag out only when guests turn up unexpectedly or the children are universally vomity. A yarn needle and some vaguely-matching yarn helps too. And scissors.

Turn it inside out. (see pic above. But I bet you could have worked that bit out yourself, couldn’t you?)

It doesn’t have to be a turtle-neck, in fact anything but a scoop neck will do, because you are going to sew up the neck anyway.

Once you’ve sewn up the neck, and turned it inside out again (so it is right-side out!), sew straight across from armpit to armpit. This is going to form the tube that will encircle the base of the bed.

You’ll notice that my stitching is not neat. It’s not pretty. But this is a cat bed folks and if the cat complains then it can knit its own damn bed.

Stitch the underarm side of the sleeve (where the seam would be if you knit the sleeves flat) to the sides of the jumper (where the seams would be if you knit the jumper flat) to form the sides. If you miss this step out your cat will fall out of the gap around the bottom of the cat bed. While amusing for us, this will probably piss off your cat.

You’ll also notice that I never got around to weaving in the ends on this jumper. So sue me.

Now we are going to hack up one of those pillows. It doesn’t matter if it is a bit bigger than the catbed jumper because over-stuffed is good, right?

Butcher a pillow thus: cut longways so you have two long pieces. These go up the sleeves of the jumper, hopefully meeting and overlapping a bit at the neck. In fact overlapping is good – you see that other pillow? Stuff it in the torso of the jumper – this forms the base of the catbed. Quite a lot will stick out probably. Hack off the excess and stuff that up the sleeves too. Waste not, want not!

Now with big ugly stitches, sew up the bottom edge of the jumper, encasing the pillow.

Then stuff the cuff of one sleeve up the other sleeve until the ends of the pillows meet and you have a ring of stuffed sleeves. Secure with a few more stitches.

Stitch the last bit of sleeve to the base. Turn upside down and pop inside out. See all those ugly seams in the above photo? They will disappear into the crease inside the catbed between base and sides.

Ta-da!

The yarn I used was fuzzy acrylic and machine washable, as were the pillows (which is what made them so lumpen and un-pillowy in the first place) so you can throw this into the washing machine when you feel the need. If you use a wool sweater then there is no problem if it felts a bit as that will only make it shrink and hold onto the stuffing a little more.

Now you just need to test-drive it with a willing cat. I think this one will do:

I think it gets the QualCat seal of approval, don’t you?