I'm not sure what might be dancing through their heads, but our porch kitties seems very satisfied with their polar fleece beds which I finished last month. (They also have heating pads underneath to keep them even snuggier.) Mama – that's the lovely longhair gray one – brought her three little striped kittens to our side porch one rainy August evening in 2012. Well, what could we do but offer them food and an old rug to curl up on? So, of course, they stayed. The kittens were feral, while Mama, oh-so-thin under all that fur, was only extremely wary. And, of course, we intended to find them homes, since we already have an official cat who definitely desires no other feline companionship. But... As you can see, they're still here, no longer feral, at least to us, but not house cats either. They live on our front porch and amuse us endlessly (as well as cause us a lot of worry).
Last
winter Mr C built them a terrific, insulated, carpeted house with two
levels inside. The only use they have made of it, even in the
coldest weather, is to sit on top of its padded, polar fleece-covered
top. So this year I decided to make them polar fleece beds. I
wanted them to be deep enough to block the wind when the occupant was
curled up inside and thus decided on constructing them with vertical
channels that would hopefully stand up rather than spreading out as I
was afraid that horizontal rings would do. As I wrote on Pattern
Review, these are labor-intensive and time-consuming to make, but not
really difficult. (I highly recommend a good audio book to take you
through this project; I listened to Paris: the novel,
by Edward Rutherfurd: 30 CDs! That was for four beds.) If you'd like
to make one, read on for my complete tutorial.