DIY Refillable Catnip Toys

This month’s Caturday post is about a quick and easy stash-buster project: I made a refillable catnip toy for our kitties to wrestle with!

We have SOOOOO much catnip from our little herb garden that, for a while there, I couldn’t harvest any more catnip because the tins were already so full. We grew this catnip planning to use it for our kitties, and now I finally have a way to do that!

The problem with all of our other catnip toys (including the catnip mouse I made a while back) is that they aren’t refillable. Once the catnip scent goes away, they’re no longer interesting, and short of rubbing fresh catnip on the outside, we have no way of “refreshing” the catnip in those toys.

But this toy is totally refillable! I used velcro to keep it shut while the kitties are playing, but I can pull it open and replace the catnip later on if I want.

Refillable Catnip Toy

You need:

• a rectangle of fabric (something sturdy, our cats kick the heck out of their toys!)
• a strip of velcro
• stuffing of some sort
• catnip
• a small fabric sachet (I used an empty tea bag; a coffee filter would work too)

The sewing parts of this project are pretty simple, so I didn’t take a lot of pictures. Start with a long rectangle of fabric; my rectangle was about 5″ x 22″.

Sew velcro strips onto each end of the rectangle so that you can velcro the rectangle into a loop. Stick the velcro together and turn the fabric inside out. Flatten the rectangle and sew across both raw edges.

Turn the rectangle right side out (through the velcroed opening), poke out all four corners, and fill with polyfill or cotton balls or whatever you want to use as stuffing.

Then take your sachet and fill it up with catnip. I used about two teaspoons. Once your bag is filled and closed, stick it in your cat toy, redo the velcro, and you’re done!

It’s not much to look at, but that’s the great thing about making cat toys… Cats don’t care! And it was an awesome stash-buster project because not only did I use up some of the leftover fabric from the diaper bag I’m making, but I also got rid of a bunch of the catnip we grew in our indoor herb garden!

Catnip crash!!! My cat fell asleep holding on to the toy after he was done playing with it. 🙂

Have you done any stash-buster projects recently? Any other ideas for using up your extra scraps of fabric?

Want to see the rest of the Caturday posts? Here they are!