A gift for new kitten owners

When I took on these kittens, I did so as a diversion for me because of my grief over losing Jack. Shortly after that I was at Target and I saw these really cute cat-faced notebooks and I thought I could use an additional project - one with an obvious deadline - so I thought I would make little scrapbooks for the new owners.

With hundreds of photos and seven kittens, I took a while to go through them and get good photos from each week to share. Sadly, for several reasons, the photos weren't the best. I ended up with over 100 photos (seven kittens, eight weeks, plus a few extras thrown in because they were cute)

Skippy has never seen me scrapbook. I originally started back in 2002 when the internet was young and photos were the bane of most people's dial-up connection. It was my plan to make scrapbooks for each year of kittens. I got the first year down and I printed out photos for year two but then dial up got better and it just didn't seem like the thing to do. I have all these cat print papers and stickers so.. I had some fun.

I didn't get overly elaborate. I bought some photo safe sticker to attach the photos to the pages and a sticker or two and a cute cat saying thrown in for fun. I didn't do it for the mothers because they don't change that much over the weeks.

Last I heard, the kittens have homes lined up and there were inquiries on Darcy and Onyx (who oddly I am calling Lucy now, I can't seem to stop) so they should be leaving me shortly.

I also want to thank everyone for having fun on my TFK4K, it was so heartwarming to see all of the comments. I was out at the post office and I had a random number pop into my head so I said "well that would be the winner" and it turned out to be Mary McNeil. Mary, if you could email me or reach out to me on facebook to let me know if you prefer a calendar or the right to name the next set of kittens..

Connie Can Craft - a gift for a friend

When I met Stephanie (who adopted Nancy and Trixie) I was in a position to help her adopt. She was about to move and her daughter had brought her into the shelter to get her to start thinking about adopting some kitties. Stephanie fell in love with my little foster kittens but didn't feel comfortable adopting two small kittens when she was about to move, so I offered to kitten sit for her, my only requirement was that she adopt them and make it official, which she was willing to do.

I was blessed that Stephanie has continued to share her girls with me and I wanted to give her a little gift to celebrate the girl's first birthday. Unfortunately, the timing didn't work out so she received this in honor of their gotcha day.

This project started out with a frame I found when my neighbor had a yard sale. I didn't realize that the silver paint trim wasn't complete until I got it home. I also was thinking I needed to do something with the backing.

The first thing was to paint the missing silver (see above photo, top left side) I dug around in my supplies and found a silver paint and so I tapped off the frame and gave it a go.

Unfortunately, my silver was a little too gray, so I decided camouflage was my best option. I dug around in my supplies again and found some Modge Podge and some white glitter.

While that dried, I thought I'd attack the back panel. More digging and I found my stash of scrapbooking papers and I found a pretty print that was large enough. More Modge Podge and that junky backer now looked really pretty. No one will really see it, but I'm happy to know it now looks pretty.

So I printed out a nice kitten photo of each of the kittens and then assembled the whole thing once it was dry.

Stephanie really appreciated the gift and the girls really enjoyed the box and the tissue paper. I was happy to be able to do something nice for her.

Crafting with Connie - fixing a broken Santa

Why buy it for $7 when you can make it yourself with $92 of craft supplies?

At one point in the past - I don't remember when - I had a conversation with Debbie (of Glogirly/Katie/Waffles fame) and I mentioned a Santa I owned that was damaged.  I'm sure I mentioned how much I loved him because he had three kittens in his hat that he was holding and that at some point his forehead was bashed in and created a hole.

But I had forgotten all about that conversation and one day Debbie sent me a Santa head. No note, no real explanation. I was quite flummoxed as to why, but of course, I immediately thought of my kitty Santa. It took me a while to work up the courage to ask Debbie why she sent me a Santa head - I mean just how do you go about phrasing such a question, but when I finally did I was rolling around laughing when she said I had told her about it.

I will admit, I was afraid to pop Santa's head off, which is why this is a post-holiday post. I figured one last Christmas with 'my Santa' if it went horribly wrong.. and so over the weekend I found myself a screwdriver and went to work.

The manufacturer of my Santa did not want his head to come off.. not one little bit. I was hesitant to rip the head off or smash it with a hammer in case I did not like the way the new head looked. I must admit, I felt quite creepy taking a screwdriver to the back of Santa's head.. (oh for the love of Pete, I hope Google spiders don't index my website with that last sentence) They used some serious glue to attach it..

Once I finally popped off the head, I put the new one on and I was actually surprised at how well it looked.

From the front, he almost looks like he was designed to look like that.  In profile, you can see that the head is just a bit too big for his body and it hangs off a bit, but nothing a 'scarf' wouldn't fix.

I ended up throwing the old Santa head away.  It was hard because I am a saver, but I knew I would never use the head for anything and I would just look at it and lament that we had damaged the original; I would never come to terms with Santa's new do.  Husband was a little freaked when he went to throw something out a little later to find Santa was looking up at him from the trash.

Thank you, Debbie!  You have given Santa a new lease on life.

Sponsored Post - Crafting with #TractorSupply to celebrate #PAW2014

Being a member of BlogPaws opens me up to sponsored opportunities. Many of them don't fit with my philosophies and my blog, but occasionally one pops up that I can't resist, and this was one of them.

My goal - to go to Tractor Supply and armed with a $25 budget and find something to craft something that benefits shelters and the animals at the shelter, then to share that craft with you and promote their PAW Week September 17-21th with their main instore event on Saturday the 20th which is going to be an event with pet adoptions and giveaways.

I had been to PAW week before, and bought a great deal of cat food for the shelter and my foster kittens so I was all over this. My first time into Tractor Supply surprised me because I was expecting more of a hardware store, but it was a lot like your old time country store with a wide variety of products, from boots, to clothes, gloves, paint, heating, safes, heating, and pet and animal supplies including premium brand food, treats, flea & tick control, beds, wireless containment, crates, kennels, collars, leads, bowls, grooming supplies, toys for cats, dogs, rabbits, chickens, horses and other pets

This being a cat blog, I wanted to do something for the cats at the shelter. Unfortunately for me the shelter has their own crafting crew, so they are crafted to with in an inch of their life. I mean just look at what they have done.



That last one is in the bathroom! this was going to be hard. I spent some time surfing Pinterest and googling cat crafts, (there are some really great ideas here and here) and I even went to the shelter to ask them about their handful of feral cats that wander the property (they have great places to hang out in the winter so making a cat igloo was out)

So armed with a few ideas of things I could make for toys, I thought it best to head over to one of the two Tractor Supply stores near me. Tractor Supply makes its home in rural communities so both stores are about half an hour away in opposite directions, so I just picked one and off I went.

I wandered around for a while and realized most of the ideas I had walking into the store were not going to work out. They do have clothes, and they do have baby socks for quick cat nip toys, but I couldn't spend $5 for something I could probably get for free at yard sales. I had seen a very interesting craft made with wooden dowels, but this store didn't have any. I asked a very nice young man and he said that they did have metal ones, but no wooden, and yes, they might have them in larger stores down south, but I thought it might be cheating if I pretended to buy one and make something with it.

I found some nice metal buckets and I thought I might be able to make something nice with those for holding grooming supplies for the cat rooms, but the cat rooms do have something nice for those. I saw flatter metal pans that might make nice litter boxes for a shelter (since plastic can hold on to bacteria) but once again our shelter uses metal pans for litter boxes.

I saw some egg cartons and thought those could make some fun crafts, but once again I ran up against my ultra frugal ways. I saw a bird house I could paint which might bring some bird TV to the cats, but at our shelter the cat windows face out on to the parking lot and there really is no good place to put them. I thought about making a bird feeder that you could attach to a window, but I couldn't find any suction cups.

I finally stumbled upon a few things that I thought would make some really interesting crafts. This is the first one.. can you guess what it is?

It is a "chick feeder". This one is most likely cheating, but I couldn't help it. I thought this would make a very fascinating foraging toy for cats. Boy was I right. The Crew got treats in theirs while the fosters got a few toys.

But this was a crafting challenge so I purchased a burlap bag and dressage whip. I knew I was going to need some catnip which I had at home (but that they also sold there) and some duct tape that again I had at home (but they also had there) and possibly a nice fat furry mouse (sold there, but I had at home).

When I got home, I realized pretty quickly that the burlap bag was a huge hit.

Skippy was also quite enamoured with the whip just the way it was. I liked the whip because it has a nice hand-weight and it has a nob at the end so when you get an aggressive cat who enjoys pulling on wand toys it would be a lot harder to pull it out of your hand. Wand toys are something cats are very hard on and at the shelter and they do not last. I thought I could turn the whip into a fishing pole type toy with a little duct tape and the string from the burlap.

Skippy thought the whip was perfect just as it was, we had spent about 10 minutes playing with it, and was a little concerned about what I might do to it.

I tied a knot in the string to give a little more resistance when the cat pulls on the other end. I wrapped the duct tape around the end of the whip once, then placed the string with the knot above the next wrap then wrapped over the string and continued until the knot was covered as well. I had cut off a little too much tape so I trimmed it off and finished wrapping it and then gave it a little squeeze for good measure. Unsure what to do with the piece of tape I cut off, I wrapped it over itself so it wouldn't get stuck on anything. I then remembered the favorite toy of the cat of my youth, which was just a piece of paper tied at the end of a string. For the fun of it, expecting I would still end up tying a mouse on the end, I tied the rolled up piece of duct tape at the end and boy was that a HIT!

Twee is VERY hard on wand toys. She has broken quite a few after just a few minutes. As you can see in that last picture, she is yanking on it quite a bit and the tape held, so I have high hopes for this creation. I bet it would hold up quite well in a shelter environment. I still had the much loved burlap bag - I got it for a dollar! I bet these would be nice stuffed with straw or hay for feral cats to sleep on, or dressed up as a cat bed for indoor kitties (heck my cats just loved it as is).

I thought it might be fun to roll it up and make a cat kicker out of it. I folded it in half, sprinkled some catnip on top and rolled it up and tied it up with some sisal rope.

Unfortunately that was not well received. My cats aren't real fans of larger cat toys. So I then cut a two inch or so stip off the bag, cut it in half, folded that bit in half, sprinkled some catnip on that, and simply tied it up; poof, a catnip knot.

This is a huge hit. I pulled out the loose fibers from the burlap to prevent ingestion. I had expected the burlap to completely fall apart when I cut it but it held up very well. I imagine I could make quite a few of these from the rest of that sack - well that is if I can get it away from Fleurp.

I hope you enjoyed my attempt to be crafty and consider this a call to be crafty too and make something for your local shelter, they will appreciate it. If you have a Tractor Supply in your local community, you should check them out. They are on all of the standard social media outlets, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest,  so getting to know them is easy.


This post is sponsored by Tractor Supply Company and the Pet Blogger Network. I am being compensated for helping spread the word about Tractor Supply Company, but Tails from the Foster Kittens only shares information we feel is relevant to our readers. Tractor Supply Company. is not responsible for the content of this article.

Crafting for BlogPaws

Getting ready for BlogPaws I wanted to bring something to give to people I met.  I bought some starfish charms because of my love of the "Starfish Story"

Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work.

One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.

As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.

He came closer still and called out "Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?"

The young man paused, looked up, and replied "Throwing starfish into the ocean."

"I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" asked the somewhat startled wise man.

To this, the young man replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die."

Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, "But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!"

At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said, "It made a difference for that one."

— Adapted from The Star Thrower by Loren C. Eiseley

I ended up getting 75 charms from the Oriental Trading Company, and I was quite pleased with them considering the price I paid. I went out and got some silver and brownish beads to make it a little more interesting and got to work..

 and I came up with this.

shown on the cribbage table my grandfather made before I was born :) 

I am quite pleased with how they came out.  The earlier ones have just one brown and one silver bead, later ones have two brown.

Then I got ambitious and finished a couple of projects I started a while back.  The fish bead I bought years ago and had no idea what to do with... I'm kind of pleased with how it came out. I also finished up a bracelet I had been working on and made up another one with tiger's eye beads I bought.  No idea what to do with that one.. *shrug*

it is a little on the small side at the moment, but I can easily add another link or two.. Could probably even turn it into an anklet if I wanted