Ferret eggs

I should know better than to try to start something while I'm in the middle of something else. I'm working on trying to make 13 years of stay-at-home motherhood sound good enough to a potential employer so that I may actually get hired on somewhere. It's burning out my brain just a bit so I really haven't worked on any new crochet experiments for about a week or so. I really should write something here just to keep up the momentum so I'll go back and describe some of my older experiments.

A few years ago I had heard about making toys for ferrets using plastic Easter eggs and yarn. I'm always on the lookout for ferret toys so I did some internet searching and came up with a few links to toys people had made. The general idea was to put rice or dried beans into the egg, seal it up with tape or glue and then crochet or knit a case around it with acrylic yarn. As much as I liked the concept, I felt that they weren't quite safe enough for a very curious ferret. Having a ferret is quite a bit like having a two year-old child. They are insatiably curious, they put everything in their mouths, and they don't take orders well. I wanted to get rid of the tape, glue, acrylic yarn and I wanted them to be washable if possible.

I wanted to use cotton thread or yarn because cotton can be digested, unlike acrylic. I found some size 3 thread in my stash and appropriated the plastic Easter eggs that my daughter had in her room gathering dust. For obvious reasons I wanted to be able to wash the toys so I needed a non-organic filling to make them rattle. I had some hard plastic craft beads that rattled nicely inside the eggs.

My next problem was figuring out how to keep the eggs closed without resorting to tape or glue. The covers on the other eggs I'd seen were kind of loose and the glue was actually necessary to keep the eggs closed. I used single crochet and crocheted closely around the egg, actually sealing it up in the crochet.


I've given a few away to my favorite ferret shelter. The ones I kept have gone through the washing machine without damage. We air dry ours just to avoid any possible problems with the dryer. They only take about a day or so to air dry.