The Mindful Puppy Blog
By PAPIA ROWE
Making a Puppy Mat
In the past, I’ve spent hours in pet stores and online searching for the best puppy beds and the cutest most fantastic collars and leads and toys.
These efforts have been part of the therapy to contain and manage my excitement and impatience over the arrival of a puppy in my home.
On the one hand, I know that I must relish the amount of cleaning and supervision that is not necessary when you don’t have young puppies – and then on the other hand – it’s just so wonderful to be around such young dogs that the anticipation is palpable.
This year it is quite different isn’t it? I can’t wander around the stores physically to shop for my puppy so I have to take an alternative path. My answer at the moment is to go KIWI – yep, that means it’s been time to hunt through my fabric scraps and leftovers from making house curtains and getting some more mileage out of my lovely sewing machine! I absolutely LOVE my SINGER 4411 – I have spent years dabbling in sewing and can honestly confirm that there is SO MUCH you can create with a simple standard straight stitch.
Here is a picture of the final product! I decided that I could easily make up a few puppy sized bed s. The best thing and worst thing about being your own client is that if you don’t mind, then it doesn’t matter! So, I based my sizing on half a big crate and then roughcut all my material accordingly and went to it with my sewing machine. So glad that I had some border collie fabric left over from making Darran his office curtains.
I have been feeling quite self-righteous about the environmental good I am doing in not being wasteful and not buying anything new to complete these. Before this, I have been feeling quite guilty about my inability to just purchase the exact amount of material I needed to complete prior projects and being left with excess material that was insufficient to complete any other projects. How wrong I was!! It has also been wonderful to be able to use up my extra leftover material to make some more mats for all of our dogs in advance of the winter.
So far, I have made 10 beds of which 4 are puppy sized mats. Honestly, after making 10 in a row I have run out of steam on bedmaking! My advice? – pace yourself!