We made a ton of Happy Cat Toys with our orphaned socks. I must say, we had a lot – I guess I have been way to optimistic about finding the lost sock mates.

Making Happy Cat Toys is very easy and very quick – I’d say in about an hour we had over 30 cat toys. We first assembled everything to make them:

• Catnip (from the pet store, the local big one)
• Pillow Stuffing (from the craft store, Joann’s Fabric)
• Orphaned Socks (from our orphaned sock basket)
• Newspaper or something to cover your work area – it can get kind of messy. We used the Joann’s bag, but I would recommend newspaper or something else larger because we ended up with catnip everywhere (which our cats loved), but me, not so much.

The actual instructions to make the Happy Cat Toys are simple:

• Grab a bit of pillow fluff
• Pinch the catnip in/with the pillow fluff
• Plunge your hand into the (hopefully, clean) sock so that it makes a wad in the bottom of the sock (the beauty of this project is that anyone can fit their hand into the sock along with all that fluff and catnip)
• Tie the sock in a tight knot (not with your hand in it :))

You can make a few variations:

• Tying two knots over two lumps of “stuff”
• Cutting the unknotted portion of the socks to make fishtails. My favorite one is the Christmas sock cut to look like an octopus.
• Add duct tape decorations (making sure duct tape doesn’t come off when the cat plays with the toys) to make other animal shapes