Prysma’s Cat Toys

I make cat toys. Primarily, I make long rope-like ones with a catnip-stuffed bobble on the end – think of it as a small yarn mouse (the body is spool-knit/corked with a home-made spool) with a heavy tail (made the same way as the initial chain in crochet) 36 or 48 or 60 inches long. I also make smaller ones that actually do resemble mice, and on special request I do fabric mice with a roughly 50-50 mixture of catnip and pearl barley.

Yes, I have four cats. I keep the toys I make away from them. If they get ahold of them, that toy becomes theirs and I make a new one. (Freya occasionally finds this an amusing game.) No pre-played with toys!

I can’t possibly do enough to keep up with this as a business. Mostly I do these for my friends, who are spread literally all over the world. There are toys in Norway, the Netherlands, Namibia, and the UK, quite a lot all across the USA, and fewer closer to home in Canada. I also do them as a charity thing. Toys that aren’t quite perfect or that are made when I want to clean up some peculiar odds and ends of yarn, go to the Kingston Humane Society as disposable toys for the cats who are in the holding rooms the public doesn’t see, where the cats don’t otherwise get toys most of the time.

If you want some, ask! I keep making them anyway, they’re a relaxing way to keep my hands busy, and mine can only play with so many (no matter what Freya claims)!

Toys I send to friends, I don’t charge for. However, I do appreciate donations to Kingston Animal Rescue or Spay Neuter Kingston Initiative or your own local no-kill shelter, feral colony caretaker, or similar. Donations, by the way, don’t have to be money – most organizations have wish lists of things they need, and that can include something as simple as old towels.

Here’s what they look like:

For pictures and videos of happy felines, use the dropdown menu above (under “Prysma’s Cat Toys” of course). You can now also find a tutorial on how to make them yourself!

(All pics and videos belong to the person who took them – they’re shown here by permission. Some have been cropped and/or resized but otherwise not altered, other than all of them being watermarked across the bottom. Credit is given by icanhascheezburger/cheezpeeps screen-names unless otherwise requested.)

Edited to add:

In the summer of 2013, during a heatwave when it was just too warm to do much of anything, I made a major batch of toys for SNKI to sell at their info tables: