 Hey everyone welcome back to vlogmas day six. Today the main thing I'm working on is making cage liners and fleece beds for our Christmas cage themes. So I'm going to show you guys how I make my liners. Okay so let's talk about what fleece I have. First up I had ordered this moose print for the girls cage a couple years ago and I never really finished making liners with it so I went ahead and ordered more to make sure I had enough for liners. You can just see all the cute little moose on there and then I have this nice green dark green to go with it. That's kind of the color scheme for the girls cage. For the little babes cage so Johnny and June they don't really have any of their own fleece that I've made specifically for their cage so I got them this cute Christmas woodland print and then I have this red fleece to go with it. So that's going to be the color scheme for the little babes cage. Okay guys so let's chat about how you make liners. So obviously first off you need some fleece. So the fleece that I like to use is you can see it says anti-pill on here. I usually like to use anti-pill fleece or blizzard fleece. I get the majority of my fleece from Joanne because you can, can you guys see my dog walking around? He's very interested in helping. The main reason that I get anti-pill or blizzard fleece is really just because it lasts longer. It works really well to run through the wicking process which we will talk about and it just seems to work really well for getting pig cages. A lot of the anti-pill fleece I've been getting in recent years from Joanne has been really soft too and it makes really great liners. So I usually get anti-pill or blizzard fleece. So you need some fleece then what I use for my absorbent layer is u-haul pads. So if you're not sure how fleece bedding works basically you need one layer of fleece on the top and you have to put it through the wicking process which means you have it prepared for liquid to go through. I will insert a clip in this video of properly prepared fleece versus non wicking fleece and you can see the difference. So the way fleece works is once you get it wicking the liquid will just soak through the fleece layer and it needs an absorbent layer to go into so that it's soaked up and keeps your guinea pigs from sitting in wet spots. So what I use for my absorbent layer is these u-haul furniture pads. I just get these from the u-haul store. They work really well and they're really easy to sew with because they're not crazy thick. So this is what I'm going to be using. I have my top layer of fleece. The gu-haul will go in the middle and then I will use this as the bottom layer of fleece. So I'll be able to use either the red side or the Christmas woodland animal side on any of these pads. So let's go ahead and work on making some of these liners and I will take you guys along with me and show you the process. All right guys. So I showed you the fleece that I'm going to be using. Side note I'm wearing this hat because it's what I attached my GoPro to to get you guys that GoPro footage. But for today's video I'm going to take you guys start to finish through how to make cage liners. So I showed you the fleece. I showed you the u-haul and talked a little bit about how fleece works. So let's talk about exactly start to finish how to make liners so that I can show you guys how to do that. So I have my two layers of fleece. I do not pre-wash or pre-wick my fleece. I go through the entire process of making them first and then I get them to wick. I'm going to go ahead and tell you guys right now how to get your fleece to wick really quickly in case you want to wash all of your fleece first and then make your liners. You can do that if you want to. So to get your fleece to wick which means to get it prepared so that the liquid will just go right through the fleece. You pretty much just want to put it in the washing machine in hot water and run it through three or four times. Usually works well for me. I'm usually there at three washes but I usually do a fourth just to be sure. I will put a clip in if I haven't already in this video of prepared fleece versus not prepared fleece so that you can tell the difference. But pretty much what I do is I wash the liner three to four times and I test it to make sure that it's ready. So you just put a little bit of water on it and if it soaks in pretty quickly within like three to five seconds then it's ready to go. So I'm going to make liners first and then do that process. So I'll show you guys that process later on in this video. If I get time to do that today I don't know if I will have time to make all of these liners and all this fleece and go through the wicking process but it should be sometime this week during vlogmas. If you guys want to see that process as well I will come back and put it in the description box once I do that. So the first thing that we need to do to make these liners is to figure out what size we need. So these liners with this fleece are going to be for Johnny and June's cage which is a two by five C and C cage. For this cage we are actually going to be making two liners because I think it's a lot easier to clean and to do laundry when I have two smaller liners instead of one huge one. So I'm going to figure out what size two liners need to be to cover a two by five. So the first thing we need to figure out is the dimensions that we need. So my C and C grids are 14 inches square. So we're going to use that as our measurement. So 14 times two is 28 inches. So that is how long the two grid portion of the cage is. When you're making cage liners you don't want to make them the exact dimensions of your cage. You want them to be a little bit bigger especially if you're not pre wicking your fleece. In my experience when you wash it on hot fleece does shrink a little bit and you just want to give yourself some extra space in case that happens. I also like to make my liners a little bit oversized so that they overlap the edges a little bit just so that I know the whole base of my cages is covered and it just makes it easier to clean cages. So if I need 28 inches to cover the floor of my cage that way I'm probably actually going to make these liners 30 inches. Yeah I think I'm going to do 30 inches so add two inches to that measurement. So my liner one dimension of my liners is going to be 30 inches wide. So next we need to figure out how many inches is the five grid portion. So if you do five times 14 that is 70 inches but since we're splitting this in half I'm going to divide that by two which gives us 35. Again I don't want it to be perfectly lined up against each other. These liners in the cage because I want them to overlap so that the whole base of the cage is covered. So I'm going to add I might just round it off and do 40. I'm going to do 40 inches by 30 inches for these liners and that should cover the entire base of my cage. Something else I didn't mention that I also that you also need to consider when you're making liners is the distance that you're sewing. So when I sew I use a standard quarter inch seam allowance and that is like I'll show you guys what that means if you're unfamiliar with sewing when we get into making these liners but you do need to leave space for the seam allowance as well. So if you need your liner to be 28 inches wide and you cut your fleece to be 28 inches when you sew it together you're going to lose a quarter inch on either side when you sew it together so your liner is not going to be the right size. So make sure you add to the exact size that you need so that you have the correct size liner. So I'm going to make my liners 30 inches by 40 inches that will cover the entire base of their cage and it will overlap in the middle so that the entire floor of the cage is covered with two liners. So now I'm going to go ahead and cut this out. I'll show you guys footage of how I do that and then get on to the next step of how to make these liners. Getting ready to cut this fleece so what I've done basically is I took the yardage and it's folded in half when you get it off the bolt and then I folded it in half again so that I have an easier piece of fabric to work with. I've got to fix this now that I messed it all up. Move that out of the way. So it's easier to cut when I have it this way you just have to be careful to make sure you're getting a nice clean cut. So what I'm going to do now is cut it down to 40 inches. All right so then we're going to figure out how to cut it at 40 when my mat is 36 inches. So let's measure the distance this way. It's pretty well lined up with that line at this point. So we have 10 extra inches which means we need to cut this at 30. So I'm going to cut it here at 30 inches. So that'll give me 30 plus this 10 which gives me 40 and I'm going to go ahead and cut it right at 40 because 40 inches is already way more than I need. So if it ends up not being perfectly 40 inches long I have plenty of extra room to work with. So I'm going to go ahead and cut this at 30 inches. All right we have a little bit left. Okay so we have a 40 inch long piece of fleece here now. So now we need to cut it so that we have 30 inches this way. So this way this way is 40 inches. We need this way to be 30 inches. So the way that I'm going to do that is fold it the other way and the first thing that I'm going to do that's well lined up is cut the salvage off. So that is this little edge that looks you know kind of funny. That's not really part of the fleece so I'm going to go ahead and cut that off. All right so that's off. There's my little bucket. Okay so now we need a 30 inch wide piece of fleece here. So I'm going to pull it over to the edge here and have it all lined up. Okay and then I'm going to cut it at 30 inches and I should know I'm not going to. Not going to be able to get two liners out of that. Well that's a bummer. I was hoping I could. That's all right we can use this piece to make a two by two. All right so I'm going to cut this piece at 30 inches here. 30 so I needed 28 right. I'm actually going to cut it at 31 just to be on the safe side. I like my liners to overlap quite a bit so I'm going to add an inch on there. Okay so here's our first piece for our liner. This is 31 inches by 40 inches so this should be perfect to cover half of the babes cage. So there is that piece. This piece I'm pretty sure is not going to be long enough. No it is not. So we're going to make a two by two out of this. That actually will work really well and I'll tell you what I'm thinking here. So we'll end up with two cage liners and then we'll end up with a 26 by 26 which is not quite a two by two and this will be good for under their hay area and then I'll have this smaller pad which will end up you know like this long so from here to here pretty much. This I can put underneath their Ikea bed or just under Hydeys or whatever where they go to the bathroom a lot so that should work out fine. So I'm going to go ahead and cut this here. I'm going to get this lined up better first. All right so that means we need another liner and we need red for this red for this and then red for the two liners so I'm going to show you guys how I do this in a way that saves me time but it's not very precise to be honest. So if you want them to be precise cuts you can do the exact same thing I just did match the exact measurements but what I do is lazy and this is why I don't sell liners. So with the basic process of how to make a liner with these small pads first so it's a little bit easier for you to see so what you want to do you can see I have my sorry if you can hear my furnace in the background so I have my u-haul piece I have my two fleece pieces so you want to put the u-haul piece down and then you put the fleece piece on top of it and make sure that you put the right side up so you can see that this side looks a little fuzzy and like distorted and this side doesn't so you want the nice looking side to be facing up so I'll line this piece of fleece up on here and smooth it all out and then you want to take the other piece of fleece and make sure that it's the the nice side down so you can see this side is a little less soft you probably can't see that but I can feel that this side is softer than this side so I want the soft side down because those are the pieces that are going to end up on the outside of this pad what am I saying um so you want that to come be on the outside okay so that's the trouble with cutting around these these aren't perfectly square so I have to get it as squared up as possible so make sure you get it nice and square and lined up okay so that is about as good as we are going to get with this one so I'm actually going to take some pins and pin this together and the reason that I pin this is so that all the layers stay held together nothing is shifting I don't like when I make liners and one piece of fleece shifts and then you get those like bubbles on the top of the fleece that's a problem I had when I first started making liners that I didn't like because fleece stretches so you want to make sure that you're not stretching it while you're sewing it or you could end up with one piece all wonky compared to the other pieces and that makes it hard to spot clean your cage and just doesn't look as nice so I'm going to pin all these layers together so they don't move around on me so that looks pretty good put one more here that looks pretty good pretty square you know pretty even all right so let's sew this together so here with the sewing machine I'm gonna put my pins back up okay you guys can see what I'm doing here under the sewing machine so I have my sewing machine all ready to go so what I'm gonna do is start about here and you'll see why so I'm gonna start a little ways down on this particular piece of fleece so you can see I have all of this up here and you'll see we're gonna leave a space down to this pin so that we can turn this inside out so let's go ahead and sew this together so I'm coming down to where this pin was and then I'm gonna back stitch a little bit and then I'm gonna cut my thread and take it out so you can see we sewed all the way around so what we're gonna do now is turn this inside out okay so what I usually do is I check it first to make sure that when I turn it it's going to be how I want it to be so start to turn it and it is so then what you do is I take my scissors take my scissors and you cut the corners off straight across like this you guys see that straight across just like that don't cut into your stitching okay cut across the corners and then I like to trim any like excess off like right here trim that off a little bit the rest of it's not too bad all right and then I like to make sure that I actually got all the fleece all the way around pretty sure I did okay so then you take it and make sure that you turn it based on like don't don't turn it from here with the u-haul pad turn it between the two pieces of fleece so what I usually do is put my hand in it and grab the bottom and then just pull pull pull pull push push push okay until it comes right side out put my hand in then I push all my corners out like so the corners pushed out and then I just make sure that it's all nice and turned all the way to the seam so I have the nice pad here all nice and flat I usually also take my scissors here and push my corners out all the way that one's pretty good that just make sure that your pad is like nice and square looking with nice corners don't push too hard don't rip your fabric don't rip through your seam just push just a little bit that you can get in there with the scissors where you can't get in there with your finger push the end of the seam out just like that all right so this guy is ready to be finished up so just flatten it out make sure it's nice and you know flat and square all right so it looks pretty good here so you can see obviously we have this hole so we're going to close this up first so how I do that is I take it and I roll it under like so what I actually like to do is I like to overlap my okay this can get a little tricky so I like to cut this down a little bit not the fleece just the u-haul okay so that it's not in that little seam and then I overlap the fleece and then roll it under okay so I did a pretty good job there I got that whole seam closed looks a little wonky but it's all right it is all right as long as it's all closed that's what I care about so I'm going to snip these off all right and it's time for the last step so what I do is I start in the corner here and you can kind of feel there's like an edge here from all the bulk of the seam so I just sew right along that down this whole entire thing so I'm going to do that now so I sewed around the whole edge there so then what I do last on these smaller pads is I just go from one corner to the other that just keeps the u-haul from shifting on the inside but that is this entire pad done ended up pretty good so then last step make sure you clip all of your threads my sewing machine cuts them down pretty well but make sure to cut your threads and then this one is ready to go on the washing machine so I'm going to set this one aside and work on some of the rest of these the cage set is done I do want to make a blanket for their Ikea bed but it's not really going to be a pad it's just going to be a little blanket so I'm not going to show you guys that I'm going to do that sometime so I made this snuggle sack basically I just kind of eyeballed it and ended up putting two pieces of fleece together and then I have boning in here so that it stays open and then we have our two by two 26 by 26 size pad we have the smaller pad to go under their Ikea bed and then there's two square pads and then there are two liners so that is an entire cage set for the little babies so that is pretty much the tutorial on how to make liners and small pads let me know if you guys have any questions down in the comments and I will try to answer them as much as I can all right guys so I'm going to go ahead and end the vlog here this video is already going to be pretty long with all the footage of teaching you guys how to do this again let me know if you have any questions down below I will link products and all that kind of stuff down in the description box as well thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you in tomorrow's vlog