This is not a drill: I made cat clothes and Toby wore them…for about 24 (glorious) hours. Why? He has to wear a glucose monitor to check how the insulin is working. It’s a human monitor that supposedly can stick on for up to 14 days, but we didn’t know if he would immediately try to lick it off.
So we had the vet put him in a medical shirt after they applied the monitor Saturday morning. He hated it. He looked like a sad, scared sausage in a casing–and that’s after I hiked it up from snapping around his tail.
I bit my nails for an hour or so and then thought, “Wait. I have baby clothes patterns. I have so much fabric. I can MAKE my cat a better shirt.” Reader, I did:
I used the Brindille and Twig free Ringer Tee pattern (last made for a human baby) and cut the back on the flat, adding an overlap for a placket. I finished all the edges with foldover elastic and used my trusty KAM Snaps.
He tolerated that shirt so much better (you can see he’s less mad about it) but the neck was still a little low. So I made another one that afternoon, using the neck binding piece from the pattern…and leftover fabric from a shirt for Doc (!!!). Reader, I died. It was so cute:
Toby deigned to wear his second shirt overnight and we took it off Sunday for supervised “naked” time. In hindsight that was a mistake, since he was having none of it when we tried to put it back on while we left for a visit Sunday. But he’d left the monitor alone for that visit, and it was still on Monday morning, so we made a deal that he didn’t have to wear clothes if he didn’t try to tear off his monitor.
Hooray for sewing, though–I solved a problem in about 20 minutes (and enjoyed seeing my baby in a handmade outfit).
