The Barn - Fall Cage Accessories

You can easily make a fall barn hide using the House pattern in the
Tutorials for Common Rat Hammocks

It is time to put the Halloween hammocks away and start decorating the rat cages for fall. I created my first fall hammocks last year (see Fall Decorating Ideas), with pumpkin hides, a snuggle sack full of fleece leaves, and maple leaf-shaped flat hammocks.

This year, I spotted a fabric I just knew I had to have. It was available from Fabric.com and it was more than I usually pay for rat hammock fabric (knowing that they will just chew it up). But I fell in love with it and bought it anyway (good thing I did - it is no longer available). The fabric features an apple/pumpkin farm, scarecrows and sunflowers, and lots of fall birds looking for something good to eat. Everything I love about fall in one colorful print. It even had a coordinating leaf print.

I put together a standard DCN hammock set and then realized that what would really bring it to life would be a barn hideaway. Fortunately, I had already created a pattern for a house (used to make haunted houses and gingerbread houses) and it could easily be used to craft a barn without any modifications. You can find the instructions in the Tutorials for Common Rat Hammocks and Accessories PDF.

Using that tutorial, I put together the barn shown above to serve as the centerpiece of the set.

And this is the cage decorated for fall:

There are rats in the barn! Burt and Hammie during in-cage intros.