Guinea Pig Sleeping Bags

I love my wee piggie.  She’s funny and adorable when she eats and makes me laugh when she squeaks for food.  But she has this one little habit that I’m not so fond of:  She pees on me.

Sadly, for all their wonderful qualities, guinea pigs aren’t really potty-trainable.  (Some claim that their pigs are potty trained, but those pigs seem to be much the exception, not the rule. The people who surrendered Tia even said that she would be easily potty-trainable, because she ‘always went in the same spot’.  Yeah, nope.)  As such, cuddling with them, carrying them around, etc… requires you either be okay with being peed on (pass) OR having a towel draped over you or swaddling the piggie.

When I went looking for direction on how to prepare fleece for cage bedding on the interwebz, I ended up on Pinterest, as one does.  There I saw several pins for guinea pig cozies or cuddlers.  I also came across one gal who called them sleeping bags. So! Cute!

After my guinea pig cage lining extravaganza, I had quite a bit of fleece yardage left over.  One shouldn’t leave fabric like that just sitting about, you know?  I had pinned some of the best looking cuddler tutorials and revisited them when I realized I had ALL this fleece, pre-washed and ready to cut!  I looked at a few of the designs and found that most were fussier than I wanted to bother with.  I also had leftover furniture pads (AKA recycled denim fabric) that are absorbent from cutting cage liners, too.  With a few minutes to think about it, I had devised my own sleeping bag design and I’m super happy with how it turned out.

The challenge with most guinea pig products designed to be absorbent and cuddly is that the blend of polyester (fleece), cotton (denim pads) and lining fabrics (some sort of synthetic, PUL being popular – the stuff they put in cloth diaper covers that breathes but doesn’t let liquid pass through) have different washing and drying requirements.   The fleece will tolerate a bit of heat, but will shrink, and at a different rate than the cotton naturally.  The synthetic liner will break down when subjected to too much heat (and by break down, I mean LEAK).  The cotton is where the wet ends up (it flows through the prepared fleece and is absorbed by the cotton, held there by the liner).  So the cotton gets the most gross.  Also, I’m old school and the only way to sanitize things (especially with bodily fluids) is detergent and HOT water. The cotton denim pads have already been washed HOT, dried HOTTER several times and have most of their shrink out of them.  But there’s still that pesky issue of STINKY GERMS.  EW.

All the patterns I found were unlined (why?  they are just gonna pee on the fleece AND THEN it’s gonna leech onto you…) or they had everything all sewn up together.  It looked very tidy, but after the laundry lesson above, we know that it won’t stay tidy (because shrinkage) OR stay very effective for very long.  Miss Tia has anywhere up to another 6-7 years of life in her and I’m not wanting to do this every 6 months, so I needed something more sustainable.

Fleece tends to grab onto itself.  Some of the sleeping bags I saw online were designed to fold over. So why not have a bag designed to fold over and use fleece’s tendency to grip to itself to hold this together?  (Also, adding snaps would work, too, and I may do that yet!)

So, here’s what Hubs & I did:
(I had desire but not enough spoons to cut AND sew, so Hubs helped me out by cutting.  Thanks, Hubs!)

I chose pairs of fleece fabric (the leftover no-sew fleece blanket kit pieces were just yelling “COORDINATE ME!!”).

For each LEAKPROOF sleeping bag, Hubs cut the following:

• 12″ x 24″ fleece fabric for the outside
• 12″ x 30″ fleece fabric for the inside
• 12″ x 24″ denim pad for the absorbent layer
• 12″ x 24″ PUL liner 

After sewing and trimming, leave the inner fabric seams out and slide the denim pouch over top, also seams out.  Turn the outer fabric and PUL pouches seams IN (using a fingertip or chopstick to push into the corners and turn them all the way out!).  Slide the PUL layer into the outer fabric and then work the pieces together. The cut edges don’t need any treatment at all since fleece and PUL won’t fray and the cotton is pre-shrunk enough that the edges are stable as well.

  

Sometimes I just wanna hide my head under the blankets, too, Tia…

For her cage sleepers, I cut 2 12″ x 24″ pieces of coordinating fleece fabric and sewed side seams as above.  I turned one seams IN and slid them together, so none of the seams were exposed.  As a top closure I used a zigzag stitch to hold the layers together for warmth (and to make sure no threads were exposed to tempt those little teeth!).

As you can see, her cage is amazingly stylish now. And the sleepers can be rolled back – they are plenty long for my piggie!

Tia Approved!