We wanted to get a Christmas Tree cat bed this year, so we could use it as our Christmas tree instead of making one. The Santa Hat cat bed is a bit ragged looking, and it is, well frankly, a bit flaccid.

Mrs Claus put in an order for a certain bottle of pills to help with this, but it was not sufficient.

We found a Christmas Tree cat bed at Wal-mart for an OK price, so we went ahead and bought it for this Christmas. The problem is that there is no base, so the bed is kind of small. Parts of MacKie always hang out; nothing major, just his head or his legs or both.

Rather than make an entire new Christmas Tree cat bed, we decided to just build the base bed, like the brim of the Santa Hat cat bed. The tree would just Velcro on top. In the future, we can pull off the “ornaments” and put in Velcro tabs, so the ornaments can be seasonally appropriate – hearts, rabbits, flags, pumpkins, etc.

The base bed was designed to allow the foam to be removed, so the bed could be washed without breaking down the foam. The first attempt is made from a disc for the bottom, a pleated outside edge, an upper inside edge, and a lower inside edge. The upper and lower inside edges would Velcro together.

We picked brown corduroy for the bed. We thought it would be stronger than plain cotton and still give a bark like appearance. Here you can the the disc of the base with the lower inner edge. The lower inner edge only sticks up about an inch.

Here you can see the outer edge attached. You can see a few of the pleats that are used to control the shape. The pleats give the cloth a shallow U-shaped cross section.

We borrowed a portable sewing machine from John’s aunt. It is from the 1950’s, and the motor is not that strong. Rather than try to sew through 7 layers of corduroy, we bought some bias tape to enclose the raw edges.

The quality of the seam is not grate for several reasons. The sewing machine has no seam guides, material is thick, and John has not sewed for a long time.

As soon as it was bed shaped, Cleo had to beta test it.

Clearly, it is acceptable.

This is what the finished bed base looks like without and with the tree on it. The tree still needs to be modified and the Velcro installed on both base and tree.

We put the cushion from the tree in it, and MacKie had to test it too.

Clearly, it passes inspector #13’s comfort test.

We are going to build a second larger bed in a slightly different manner. After it is done, we will decide which goes with the tree and which is stand alone.