Loading up on ribbon

With the Christmas ribbon marked down 60% at JoAnn Fabrics and a lot of what I need still available over at the Dollar Store, I loaded up with about $30 worth of discount reels of ribbon so I can make the scratch 'n sniff books. This stuff just isn't available all year, so when I can get it for cheap like this, it's worth loading up. It's hard to find 2" wide sheer stuff and I can't get a regular 'sheer' netting to look professional after it's sewn down.

I feel a little like I'm going into the 'publishing' business sorta.

Books For Cats

I've done Books For Cats as a catnip toy item for two years now, and it just hit me today for the first time that -- DUH! -- I never even considered doing a 'scratch 'n sniff' book! Talk about missing the boat!

So I've spent MORE money on fabric that looks like book covers (sorta) at WalMart and will try making up a bunch of sets of those for selling.

I also like the name 'boogie mats' that some cat toy places make (flat placemat type items that have catnip between the fabric layers), and think I can do up something similar but call them 'meditation mats' instead. And not make them so big, the ones I've seen were a foot by two feet large almost. Anything the size of a piece of standard typing paper would be fine. I've certainly got enough catnip to play around with larger items.

The Boogie Mats are around $9 each. I'd be making a good profit on mine even if I priced them at $4 each.

A variation on it--I think worth a try too!--is something that looks like a spreadcloth for a tarot deck, with a card layout on top of it so the cat looks like they're doing a tarot reading. Geez, I've got my own Chat du Marseille deck I made, I could reduce down the cards and use 5 of them in an arched spread (color the cards too), and tack the whole thing down with a sort of quilting that catches the card tops and bottoms so they don't shift. They'd be under see-through netting and would stay right in place that way. Hmm. Harry Potter Kitties doing Divination Classes.

I have....a new idea

After paging through those cheese/wine/chocolate gift catalogs I'm starting to think I maybe should do up gift bags of several small cat toys, in those cellophane bags used for candies, and have them sold as sets.

Little things though, like scale down the strawberries I make and do them half with the red strawberry fabric and half with brown polar fleece to make 'chocolate dipped strawberries'. And I found some nubbly white almost furry fabric that would be great for coconut appearances on things--how about coconut conures, or macaroon macaws (scaled down to sparrow size of course). Two to a bag.

Heck, next step would be mice dipped in 'white chocolate' or 'dark chocolate'. Maybe with the occasional choco dipped hamster added?

Gotta go check out baking supplies online, I think that's the best area to look for the clear crinkly type bags these would need.

Sadly, with the 12" of snow that fell last week that's the end of this year's crop of catnip (dammit! There was one more picking I could have done). I even stuffed the 'fresh' stuff from the previous picking into toys beforeit was dry -- taking a chance on it molding, but it dried really nicely and the toys make really crunchy sounds when they're squeezed, so it worked out fine.