Cheap and Easy Cat Toys

These DIY Cat Toys are so cheap and easy to make they are practically free! Plus unlike bought cat toys, cats will actually play with these toys!

How many times have you bought a toy for your cat only to get it home and find that your cat or cats just ignore it? It has happened quite a few times in our house and the result is that we have a box of cat toys that the cats are not interested in! The problem is you never know what toys will take their fancy until you get them home 🙁

What is even more frustrating, our cat will ignore the expensive toys but enjoy playing with crude homemade toys like scrunched up paper and old toilet rolls!

One thing that we have found that our cats love to play with is old wine corks. They especially like champagne/sparkling wine corks because the uneven shape of the cork means that it doesn’t travel in a straight line. Our cats have spent more time chasing wine corks around the living room floor than they have spent playing with other bought toys!

So I decided to add some extra fun for the cats by adding some wool to the corks. I have made a couple of cork cat toys this way.

Firstly I made a simple tasselled cork toy that our cats enjoy chasing around the floor by themselves. I also made a dangling cat toy which also has tassels. This toy has a longer piece of wool attached, so that we can dangle, swing, and pull the cork around for the cats to chase!

They are quite quick to make and they’re easy because they are so simple! Better still they are almost free because chances are you will have everything you need already. I can’t think of a better reason to open a bottle of wine if you don’t have any wine corks already lying around!

Our cats love them; they especially love to chase the dangling toy around the floor as we pull it along!

How to Make Cheap and Easy Cat Toys:

Materials:

• Wine corks
• Knitting wool
• Large nail (mine was 75 mm long and x 3 mm thick)
• Large darning needle
• Hammer
• Pliers

Directions:

Hammer the nail down through the top of the cork in the centre. Make sure that you have the cork sitting on a surface that won’t be damaged when the end of the nail comes through.

Once some of the nail is sticking out the bottom, use pliers to pull it back out again.

Thread some wool onto the darning needle and push the needle through the cork via the hole made by the nail.

If you just want some short tassels on your cork make sure you pull enough wool through the needle eye so that it is double stranded and around 30cm long.

If you are making a longer dangling toy then I recommend passing a single strand of wool through the cork, leaving about 15cm at the bottom and around 1 metre at the top.

You can now add some extra tassels to your cork by either tying wool around the cork itself or tying some more pieces of wool to the wool that is already sticking out the bottom of the cork.

Once you a sure that the wool is secure you can go have some fun with your cat!

For more cool ideas for your pets check out my Pets Pinterest board!