Making a Cat Cave

With all my cat item related posts lately, you’d think I have a cat. But no, two small dogs that don’t like cats. The cat toys I make to sell and I recently made a cat cave to give my sister for Christmas. She has a new cat and requested a cat cave. Her cat is still a kitten but is supposed to get fairly big so I wanted to make a good sized cave. Ann has done a how to post about making cat caves if you’d like further ideas.

I started with a resist made from floor underlayment. That is a Sharpie pen in the middle to give a little bit of scale.

I usually like to work inside out when I use a flat resist. So this is the embellishment layer that will be on the outside when I finish the cave.

The embellishments were mainly nepps and curls in grey and white. I used a variety of fibers including Icelandic, Gotland and Merino.

I then added a couple of layers of black wool which was a mix of merino and mixed 56’s. I wet the black down and then progressed to the white layer that will be the inside of the cave.

Here’s the white layer after it is partially complete. I ended up doing 5 layers in total. The white wool is mixed 56’s.

I then wet the whole thing down, rolled and rubbed like crazy. The felt is starting to come together in this photo.

I used this rolling stick to work it over a bit too. This was originally meant to be a curtain rod and has nice grooves in it to work the felt. I then cut a hole and removed the resist. Fulling in the sink and beating it around quite a bit to stiffen it up. I forgot to take any photos at that point, sorry.

Here’s the cat cave after finishing the fulling process. I put it on top of the original resist so you could see how much it shrunk. After I spun the water out of it, I stuffed it with towels and blankets to dry.

Here’s the finished cat cave. I almost forgot to take photo before I sent it off to my sister’s house.

Now the only question is will the cat fit in this hole? I didn’t want to make the hole really big and I guess she can always enlarge the hole if need be. Have you made any gifts this year? We’d love to see what you’ve made. You can post your photos on Flickr or on the forum.