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.

Hammocks for Valentine's Day

Over the last several months, I have been working on creating hammock sets for holidays and seasons. I recently created a few nice sets of winter hammocks, made with flannel instead of regular cotton prints for warmth, featuring penguins, skiing raccoons, and snowmen.



But it is February now and I am tired of focusing on snow this winter. I'm sure we will have more winter to come, but we have taken a break from the winter theme to add some Valentine's Day hammocks to our cages. The following is the resulting set:

This is a double set, meant to fill both the Dual Critter Nation and the Martin's R695. This set also includes a floor mat shaped like a candy heart, with the message "BE MINE" embroidered on the front. This floor mat is made with the same materials as the liners and is meant to dress up the cage floor a bit. I am very happy with the way it came out.

Some of the hammocks installed in the DCN

This set also includes a corner hut, a cross between a corner hammock and a cube. While I usually set my cubes flat on the ground and use the ribbon loops to keep it erect, the corner cube works well hung in a corner, as it has ribbon loops to support both the top and the bottom. I make mine with windows on the sides (if I don't, my rats will chew their own windows). I took pictures as I built this hammock, and will be adding it to the list of hammock tutorials soon.

Corner Hut from the front (top) and side (bottom).

Next on the agenda, St Patrick's Day Hammocks.

Christmas Cages

We had to make all new Christmas hammocks this year because our old sets were shredded and unsalvageable. This year, we went with all flannel prints. We needed three sets of hammocks - one for the CN, one for the Martin's, and one for when another set was in the wash.

I decided on three different prints - one for each set. The first, a basic red, white, and green pattern that was bright and modern. The second, a red and white candy cane design. The third, a more traditional old-fashioned gingerbread design.

I was worried that I wouldn't get them done on time, but yesterday, I finished off the last of the three sets, and today, both cages are decked out in holiday style.

Red, Green, and White Christmas

(this set was the first finished and was up last week):

 

The Gingerbread Cage

 

The Candy Cane Cage

(and Loki, looking out the door, wondering when Santa will be here)

 

 

The only thing special that I made this year was a new stocking for the ratties. I still have not mastered the art of making stockings, but this will do for this year.

I didn't do any special cage decorating this year - I just didn't have time to come up with ideas. I was too focused on getting the hammocks made. Hopefully, next year, we can think about some original decorating ideas.

Fall Decorating Ideas

Critter Nation Decorated for Fall

For the first time, we have put together a fall theme for the cage. I love the colors of the trees in fall and this year has been an especially colorful one in our area. I decided to focus on this for our theme.

I picked out three cotton prints that featured leaves of various colors. However, when put together, the color of brown stood out too much. So I decided to go with bright fleece colors: tomato orange, pumpkin orange, warm yellow, and a lemon/lime green (these pictures are a little overexposed from the flash and so the green looks washed out into a dull yellow, but in real life, the green really pops). I packed away the browns, rusts, and golds that also would have gone nicely with the theme.

 

I reused one of the Halloween pumpkins, turning it around so the circular back door opening was featured instead of the jack-o'-lantern face, then made a new set of fall hammocks as shown below:

 

Fall Hammock Set

These are mainly my standard hammocks - modifying a few to better fit the fall theme. I modified the web-shaped hammock pattern, using a maple-leaf shape instead. I made the top layer orange and the bottom layer rust, but any fall colors would have worked. The design came out well and in the future I may use more of these hammocks to help simulate the appearance of falling leaves.

 

Cube with Acorn-Shaped Opening.
Above Is the Falling Leaf Hammock.

The cubes were made with acorn-shaped openings and I added a peek-a-boo hammock with a maple-leaf shaped opening. It came out really nice, but was tedious to sew.

Nothing is so comfy as a sack of fall fleece leaves!

Finally, I embroidered a leaf pattern onto a solid orange cotton fabric and made a snuggle sack out of it, representing a sack of leaves. But what sack of leaves would be complete without a set of colorful leaves to fill it with? So I took the same maple-leaf cookie cutter I used to trace the opening in the peek-a-boo hammock and I traced leaf patterns on scrap fleece pieces, cut them out, and packed them into the snuggle sack. I scattered a few of the extras around the cage and clipped a few to the cage bars to give the appearance of leaves falling everywhere.

An accessory that goes extremely well with this theme is the Super Pet Natural Tree Trunk Hideout. This is my favorite of all the commercially made huts that sit on the ground, and it goes fantastically well with this theme (but may be too large for some cages). It also looks good with a spooky Halloween theme or any kind of nature/woodsy theme.

I also reused one of the ceramic pumpkin food dishes for this design. I got them a few years back in the Target dollar section.

So far, I only have the Critter Nation done. Loki's hammocks for the Martin's R-695 are not yet finished, but should be by the end of the week.

One thing I wanted to add is a few walnuts or similar nuts in the shell to scatter in the cage. Nuts on a regular basis are too fatty for the rat diet, but an occasional nut every now and then won't hurt, and the shell can keep them busy and entertained. I haven't seen any yet at my grocery store, so we had to do without.

Check out the photos below for a closer shot of each level of the CN.
 

Top Half of the Critter Nation

 

Bottom Half of the Critter Nation

Halloween Cages



Halloween is almost here and the rat cages are all decked out in spooky style. This week the pattern is full of Jack-o'-lanterns in the cemetery, combined with the new U-Haul furniture pad/fleece liners in shades of orange and black. The new liners are really nice so I am hoping they will do well controlling odor. So far, no chewing, but it is way too early to tell.

 

 

 

This is the alternate design: a Halloween town pattern with some bats, ghosts, pumpkins, and candy corn for variety. This design is a lot more colorful, pulling in the oranges, purples, greens, and a fluorescent yellow. The picture below was taken a few weeks ago when Pirate was still with us. Seeing him here doing well, it is hard to believe he will go downhill so quickly after this.

 

 

Loki gets Halloween hammocks as well. I've taken out his Zilla liners and put in fleece ones because I previously noticed a little blood coming from his penis area and I want to be able to easily see if he spots any more blood. I suspect he has a urinary tract infection (UTI) in addition to the respiratory infection we are treating him for. Perhaps the UTI is the immune stressor that triggered the respiratory infection. It is possible the UTI was caused by bacteria from his skin infection getting into the urethra. If so, that infection responded to Baytril and he is currently on Baytril for the respiratory infection, so it is possible both infections can be treated with one drug. Since a couple days after starting the Baytril, I haven't seen any more blood and I am hopeful that it is working. He has a recheck with the vet tomorrow, so we will know more at that time.

 

Loki is the only rat who really likes the cuddle cups. In this pic, he is in a cuddle cup from an old hammock set because I didn't finish the new cuddle cup by cage cleaning day. When I went to change out the old cuddle cup with the new one, he quickly snatched the old cup and dragged it into his litter box where he thinks I can't find it. So I let him keep it. Now he has two cuddle cups. I wonder how long it will be before one of them is moved into his cube. He seems to think his house should come complete with a sofa. He is a very particular rat and he doesn't like me messing with his stuff.

 

Tutorials for making the cuddle cup along with all the other hammocks shown in these pics can be found in the Hammock Tutorial section of the Ratropolis website.