One Of Those Duh! Moments

When I strip catnip to dry it usually I've just tossed the stems, to the tune of filling the ENTIRE garbage bin with them sometimes.  But when I dropped the toy order off at the Cat Doctor clinic the vet had shown me what a friend of hers had made, a 10 long tube jam packed with catnip stems.  It was stiff, smelled just as strong as a cat toy, and was a good use of stems.  That made so much sense! Here I was tossing them all because they were useless, and now I can actually do something with them.

 

The fabric has to be much stronger, so I pulled out some upholstery fabric I had and gave it a try.  The original I had seen was 10" x 4" x 2" thick. Mine are 10" x 2" by 1 1/2" and are plenty stinky enough. 

 

It was 'learn as you go', so first after sewing the tube I tried matching up the bottoms of the stems and keeping them wadded up to shove in. Not the best way.  I then folded down the top of the tube by a full inch and tried sticking individual stems down, which went too slow.  I then started folding the stems in half and got several together at once and that worked out best.  They went in smoothly and filled the entire tube nicely.  The 'small' stack of stems I had ended up making a good 10 tubes. 

 

While they do need to dry out a bit more (I don't want mold) the idea worked out pretty well.  I can market them as 'kicking sticks' or some such.  It's nice taking something I was just discarding and be able to make some cash off of it.

 

Seems so simple, but there's been no mention of anyone doing that online before, plus I've never run across anyone who made use of the discarded stems either.