I thought today I would share my cat bowl hack. Our grocery store carries plastic salsa bowls for $1 each (this may be a southern thing). These make awesome cat food bowls because the feet raise up the food a little for the cats, they are dishwasher safe, and if they drop, they don’t shatter. They are heavier than regular plastic bowls, so don’t move as much as the cats lick the last bits from the bottom. And the cats love them. So much so that Izzy (the inside calico), refuses to eat from the other bowls we have.
Although she is cute pretending to be a plant, I don’t want to encourage the behavior so eventually I can actually have green plants in there. I bought a cute woven hyacinth basket and filled it with straw, but she was unimpressed.
Straw filled round basket
I have a large amount of “big yarn” which is really just roving.
“Big yarn”
There are many posts and videos about arm knitting using this kind of fiber, the problem is, we spin fiber to make it more resilient and give it strength. Fiber that is only combed has neither quality. So to do a first-hand test, I crocheted up a round mat of the fiber using a P crochet hook.
Crocheted round with “big yarn”, wrong cat interested
Although I was able to crochet it (the P hook was on the small size for comfortably crocheting), it was already shedding fiber before I even finished.
Fiber separating from the body of the work
My hypothesis is that, although the stitching looks beautiful now, and it went together quickly, it won’t take much for it to look like a matted mess.
Crocheted round set on a layer of straw in the hyacinth basket
However, Sophie thoroughly approves. So she will be my tester and we’ll see what condition the matt is in a few months.
We have had unauthorized access to the chicken runs. Our outside/inside cat Sophie has figured out how to get on the roof, then she crawls onto the sunshade over the runs, and her weight bends the hardware cloth down enough for her to look in.
Sophie is stuck
Recently we came back home from being gone all day, and when I went to check the chickens I heard a pitiful meowing. Sophie had climbed on top of one of the closed doors to the runs, her entry point had closed up, and she could neither get down nor go back up. I have no idea how long she was stuck there, but she was very grateful for the help down. It didn’t stop her from getting right back up on the roof, though.
Sophie on the roof
To stop the cat from getting to the chickens and/or getting stuck again, first I took down the sunshade (since our temperatures are dropping, it was time anyway). Then I put up 2×4 supports under the gutter so that the hardware cloth could not bend down, even with a cat standing on it.
Additional bracing to prevent access
To be safe, I also tied down the hardware cloth with a loop of steel wire in the middle of each support. I don’t think the cat would have been very happy if she actually made it inside the coop. The chickens don’t seem to be afraid of her at all, and outnumber her 12:1.
The idea started as a simple desire to put up a scarecrow for fall. I even picked up a hat, shirt, and pants last year, but never got around to assembling it all. Apparently the idea had not fully ripened. This year I realized that I could flesh out my scarecrow with chicken wire. And if I did that, did I really need straw? Or a pumpkin head? Wouldn’t it look creepier if the hat “floated”? The chicken wire is more sculptable than straw. I could give the scarecrow motion. He could be running. Oh! What if he was running from another ghost deeper in the woods? That is amusing and make it creepier. I had plenty of chicken wire and even an extra white sheet. The idea was ripe.
Filling clothes with rolls of chicken wire
I cut lengths of chicken wire to be just shorter than the legs and arms, folded in the sharp ends, rolled them up individually, and slid each roll into a pant leg or sleeve. I used a larger piece for the torso, forming the neck and head by squeezing the mesh together. To connect everything I bent the cut ends around adjacent mesh, and used some aluminum wire. I roughly formed the scarecrow into a running shape, then set a tall fence stake in the meadow. I did have to make a hole in the pants to slide the sculpture onto the stake (good thing it is cloth and wire, ouch). I refined the shape and attached the hat with wire.
Composition at dusk
For the ghost I set another fence stake back farther in the woods. I shaped a head and shoulders from chicken wire and draped the sheet over the top. I secured the sheet at the crown of the head and the tops of the shoulders.
Best angle for the running effectOur cat trying to ascertain the threat levelSpooked?
Critters and Craft 