Maybe This Will Make Going To The Vet A Little Less Painful

Don’t forget to enter my giveaway for a copy of The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, which ends 11:59PM PST, Sunday, March 20th! I'm loving seeing everyone's recipes, and can't wait to try them!

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I haven’t been doing much crafting lately. This makes me sad, because I really do love making things and being creative. I wish I knew someone who lived near me who was getting married soon, just so I could be their crafting slave! :)

But doing my own crafting is difficult when all of my crafting supplies look like this:

Yes, that is a hall closet, with boxes haphazardly stacked almost as tall as I am! Nothing is easy to find, I’ve got boxes in boxes, with bags of ribbon, stacks of mismatched paper….

And my beloved cutting mat is just propped up on the floor, probably warping so it will never lay down flat again. :(

It’s impossible to find anything in this mess. Somewhere in there is my sewing machine too, collecting dust. Organizing some sort of crafting space is on my to do list, but at the moment I haven’t found the time or space, and I’m still wishing I could have a dedicated home office/crafting room.

But when I saw cute kitty-patterned fleece for 50% off in the fabric store (when I should have been looking for colored duct tape for another project), I immediately knew that I had to buy it, and come up with a creative, no sew way to turn it into cat crate liners.

See, my kitties have a vet appointment coming up soon. Which is always a traumatic ordeal. Mainly because my rescue kitty is a loud, scared, vocal, drama queen, and freaks the other cats out. They run whenever I get out their crates, because they know that it always means something they’re not going to like.

{Source}

So I’m hoping that by making these soft padded crate liners, the crates will feel a little more welcoming this time, especially if I leave them open on the floor, with treats inside, for a week before their appointment.

Since I didn't want to dig out my sewing machine, I was instead inspired with how the layers of my baby blanket (which is faded, but still in great condition because I was more of a Teddy baby) are connected, by using short strands of yarn looped through the layers and tied in a knot.

Since fleece doesn't fray, I just followed this same method, by folding the fleece so it would fit in the crates, and using yarn and a thick needle to connect the layers together. I had to put the knotted yarn side down in the crates, or the cats would just eat it, but it works really well, and now when panicked, wiggling cats are moving around in their crate, at least they won’t mess up their padding and have to lie on uncomfortable wrinkles.

(Why yes, wine IS a supply used in this project!)

("Helping")

Have you come up with any creative alternatives to sewing on a machine? And please wish me luck getting the kitties to the vet in one piece next week!

(ETA: I'm not sure why all of these photos are looking a little out of focus? I think something is up with Blogger, and it didn't like me manually resizing the photos in the HTML editor....)