Two Days in Cincinnati with My Girl Scout Troop: On the Second Day, We Got Some Education and Ate Ourselves Silly

The previous evening, all my Girl Scouts were still going strong when I was beyond ready for bed. I left them to their own activities of working on photo embellishment crafts for their Ambassador Photographer badge, playing card games (Professor Noggin is still a hit even with these big kids!), eating snacks, watching TV, and just generally having a lovely time together, but I asked that before they, too, headed up to bed, they load and start the dishwasher.

I woke up on this morning long before any teenagers, so I tumbled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen to pour myself a cup of cold-brew coffee from the refrigerator, and I found that the kitchen? Was PRISTINE! Not only had the kids loaded and started the dishwasher, as requested, so that all the dishes were sparkling clean and ready for breakfast, but they'd also tidied up and organized our kitchen island full of snacks, and spray cleaned the stovetop and all the counters, The space looked as nice as it had when we'd checked in!

I LOVE traveling with teenagers!

The oven was still not working, so the camping-style breakfast sandwiches we'd envisioned, with all the different ingredients baked on sheet pans, then sandwiched inside English muffins, wrapped in foil, and warmed up back in the oven, were a bust, alas. But at least breakfast sandwiches, unlike the previous night's pizzas and cookies, are amenable to being cooked on the stovetop. After my first cup of coffee, I prepped leftover meats and veggies and cheeses that kids might like to mix into omelets or scrambles, then whenever a teenager appeared, I directed her away from my jug of cold-brew coffee and towards her own homemade breakfast prep.

If a kid told me she'd never cooked her own egg before, I just handed her off to another kid who had. Stretch those leadership skills, Girl Scouts!

We had a REALLY full day of sightseeing ahead of us, so as soon as we'd all finished breakfast, we packed up and headed back out into the city. I 100% had a panic attack about the lack of parking in downtown Cincinnati, and at one point, as I drove in circles around the city streets, pretty sure that our entire lives would just be circling these same five blocks until we died, a Girl Scout in the passenger seat literally held my phone up so my co-leader driving the other car could coo reassurances at me via speakerphone, so hallelujah that eventually an extremely kind parking attendant of a completely full parking garage directed us to another garage that had space for us.

It turns out that Pink was playing a concert in the downtown baseball stadium that night, and everyone in the world was planning to be there!

But first, a museum!

The Ohio River was a very important crossing for the Underground Railroad, and there are numerous important Underground Railroad sites in both Ohio and Indiana, so we planned to spend the morning at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to educate ourselves on these topics of local and national history.

The museum was VERY interesting, and I think we all learned a ton, but sensitive content warning: the exhibit on contemporary human trafficking is going to be way too dark for a lot of younger kids. 

There were also art and fashion exhibits--

Look who has now graduated to Troop Helper!

--and the incredible exhibits on the Underground Railroad.

Y'all. This is a literal 1800s slave pen:

One day, out of nowhere, a nearby property owner on the Kentucky side of the river called up the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and claimed that on their property was an old tobacco barn that local legend said had once been used as a slave pen. Would the museum be interested in it?

Through archival research and physical evidence, the museum was able to verify that this building was, indeed, an actual slave pen. They had it carefully removed from the site, then carefully rebuilt, exactly as it had been, inside the museum. 

It's so sad, and so powerful, and such a testament to the importance of knowing your local history. Neighbors transmitted this story of the building's former life from generation to generation, orally, from the early 1800s to today. People passed the story on to the current property owner, who had no historical connection to the property and no way of otherwise knowing its history. And that property owner, instead of discounting the story or just ignoring it, recognized its importance and reached out to the museum. It wasn't too tough to verify, but without that word of mouth, and that property owner's initiative, that slave pen would be rotting anonymously in its field today, because historians don't just roam the back roads, looking for important things that have been forgotten, and they don't just troll the newspaper archives, looking for places that might still be there. It's our job to preserve our own local histories, to pass down stories to the next generations, and to research our own properties and families to see if there's something important to discover.

At least, that's what the docent said to me when I mentioned that I've got kind of a weird old building on my property, too. I was all, "Oh, but it's not important like THIS building!", and she was all, "Well, why don't you get your butt down to your county archives and make sure." So I guess I have a weekend project this autumn!

You can see more about the slave pen here.

I also thought that the exhibit on other local sites important to the movement of enslaved people was interesting. The photo below says that it's a buffalo trace, but I think it looks like a holloway!

Eventually, six hungry Girl Scouts and two hungry adult chaperones left the museum and walked a couple of blocks over to our meeting point for our food tour!

I was VERY excited that the kids picked this activity! I'd never done anything like it, and it was so fun! It was part walking tour, in which we'd follow our guide while she told us about the history of Cincinnati and its local food scenes, and part tasting experience, as we dipped into several restaurants and shops and markets and ate a sampling of their offerings. 

bangers and mash at Nicholson's Pub

Tyler Davidson fountain: it's an actual water fountain, too, and has a spigot you can drink from!

This is the hotel where Pink was, and there's the car waiting to take her to the stadium.

The tour ended with Belgian waffles at Findlay Market. Funny that a year ago, I'd never been to a downtown market like this, and now I've been to two different ones in Ohio and two different ones in London!

We practiced our food photography during the tour. Those Ambassador Photographer badges aren't going to earn themselves!

The kids enjoyed browsing around the market, and a few bought delicious souvenirs. My troop helper "forgot her credit card," and yet still ended up with some fudge somehow, ahem. College students are supposed to be spoiled when they're back home with you!

Not gonna lie: I was too full after that food tour, and the overwarm, overcrowded streetcar back downtown did NOT help, blurg. Time to all get some fresh air and some beautiful photos of the river by walking the Roebling Suspension Bridge!

As a bonus, at the time there was actually a Roebling Suspension Bridge photo contest underway, which I encouraged all my Girl Scouts to enter... and one of them WON!!!

And then somehow the kids were all hungry AGAIN, so we walked to Graeter's and bought them all ice cream before finally heading back to our cars that were safely and miraculously parked in the middle of the downtown chaos.

I was so tired that I blasted my Favorites playlist the whole way home and sang along loudly to every single song to keep myself revved up, and the kids in my car were so tired that not one of them uttered so much as a peep in protest. You're welcome for the two-hour concert, Girl Scouts!

Postscript: I wrote a three-star review of our Airbnb, mentioning the oven problem and the host's lack of communication. The next day, the host hit me with a Resolution Center Reimbursement Request for over a hundred dollars, claiming that we'd stolen a USB port and broken the dishwasher door. When Airbnb asked me if I wanted to file a rebuttal, I wrote them a 29-page Google Doc that used photographic evidence both from our stay and the Airbnb's listing to prove that the host was lying, and documented a pattern I'd uncovered in which whenever a guest posted a negative review of their stay, this host would write a public response that said they were going to file a Resolution Center Reimbursement Request against them. 

Airbnb decided the issue in my favor. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Two Days in Cincinnati with My Girl Scout Troop: On the First Day, We Met Kangaroos and Delved into DIY Oven Repair

In Girl Scouts, there's a standard travel progression that troops are encouraged to follow. As in, your troop should be comfortable taking field trips together before they take a day trip. They should master day trips before trying an overnight. Overnight trip mastery leads to regional travel, and regional travel mastery leads to national/international travel and longer trips, etc.

When I teach this travel progression to Girl Scout volunteers, however, I always emphasize that stepping up to, say, international travel doesn't mean that you don't go on field trips or overnight trips, anymore. Instead, you still take smaller trips, but you use those smaller trips as chances for the Girl Scouts to develop more sophisticated travel skills.

Case in point: the last time my Girl Scout troop took an overnight trip to Cincinnati, Ohio, that was their first overnight trip. They voted on the main event, an overnight in the Newport Aquarium, but my co-leaders and I planned the rest of the activities. The kids focused on building travel skills like carrying their own bags, unpacking and packing their sleeping bags, bedtime independence, staying with the group, getting along with each other for an extended period of time, picking what they wanted to eat, etc. 

This time around, we've taken I can't even tell you how many field trips and day trips together, several overnight trips, several two-night trips, a couple of regional and national trips, and an international trip. And this time around, the kids planned EVERYTHING. They wrote a packing list. They planned our meals. They decided on our activities. They voted on our accommodations. They decided what badge they wanted to earn (Ambassador Photographer!) and planned the activities to earn it. 

Essentially, they made themselves (and their two adult chaperones) an AMAZING overnight experience in Cincinnati!

First up: the Cincinnati Zoo! My kids and I have been to this zoo several times, but this was our first time since the free-range kangaroo habitat was created. Check out the roos!

As part of earning the Ambassador Photographer badge, all of us--kids and adults--concentrated on taking lovely animal and nature photos at the zoo.

The Masai Giraffe are really cool because their spots do NOT look like interlocking puzzle pieces:

Love this snoozy lion!

Does anyone else remember Meerkat Manor? One episode of Meerkat Manor used to be part of my bedtime ritual with the kids back when they were just a toddler and a preschooler, but they both swear that they still remember it, and we all still love meerkats!

I'm a meerkat!

The African painted dog is one of my two favorite animals at the Cincinnati Zoo, tied with the Florida manatee:

Remember Fiona, the baby hippo? Cincinnati Zoo is her home, and now she also has a baby brother named Fritz!

I have been to SOOO many zoos in my lifetime, and I can count on one hand the number of times that I have seen a red panda 1) awake and 2) in motion. I think this is the third time ever, and the second time was also here!

Hanging out with the Galapagos tortoises is my favorite thing to do here. You can pet their shells!

Every now and then, I lent out my camera so that the Girl Scouts could have a go at using a DSLR--most of them were using their smartphones for photos, which is fine, but it's important to see how a professional-quality camera handles, too. So for a change, I have a few photos of ME on this trip!

I got so distracted taking a photo of one of my Girl Scouts petting a tortoise that I didn't notice that I was being stalked...

We just about closed that zoo down, then drove just a couple of miles north to our Airbnb near the Over the Rhine neighborhood. 

I am normally a BIG fan of a good Airbnb when I travel with my Girl Scout troop. Instead of divvying up into five separate hotel rooms, with kids isolated and poorly supervised, and no good group space for activities or meals, a good Airbnb lets us all hang out together, do activities together, and cook meals together. 

Unfortunately, this was not a good Airbnb. It was run by a company with several properties, and I will avoid that kind of setup in the future. I checked in with the host a couple of days before our visit to specifically ask about the oven, because my anxiety likes me to double-check shit like that, and with the host's reassurance that the oven had just been repaired and worked great, I let the kids plan a multitude of cooking projects for our evening and morning there. I made several pounds of pizza dough and cookie dough so the kids could make personal pizzas and have a cookie challenge, and we packed eggs and sausage and frozen hashbrowns so they could make breakfast sandwiches the next morning.

The first kid was literally putting her pizza in the oven when she stopped and said, "Um, I don't think it's preheated yet?"

Thus began my multi-hour saga of attempting to contact the host to help me with the oven, and the host's multi-hour saga of successfully dodging any attempt to be of actual service. It seemed like the gas line wasn't actually turned on to the oven part, just the stovetop, but the host kept texting me to turn the knob in a different direction, or turn it more forcefully, or pull the oven away from the wall and check behind it(?!?), and completely ignored my requests that someone actually, you know, just come over and turn the knob themselves or look behind the oven if it was supposedly so simple. Ugh! 

Fortunately, we're Girl Scouts, so my co-leader figured out a hack that let the kids more or less bake their pizzas on the stovetop, but they didn't turn out great, and the kids (and I!) were all pretty sad. The cookies worked okay in the microwave, and the next day, every kid who didn't already know how to cook eggs on the stove learned that useful life skill!

Fortunately, these hungry Girl Scouts had a BIG food adventure planned on our second day in Cincinnati. Stay tuned!

The Post-Girl Scout Cookie Season Cookie Prep Meeting

Every year, the most annoying thing about Girl Scout cookie season is figuring out how to fit in a Girl Scout troop meeting to prep for it. My troop has been selling cookies so long that they don't need a training meeting, just an email with relevant dates and any changes from last year. But every year we always DO need something new prepped, new donation cans or signage or other marketing materials--and who has time for that between Winter Break and a cookie sale start date of early January?

This year, we had a collective revelation: why not have a post-Girl Scout cookie season meeting to prep for the next year's sale? We know exactly what materials we need to replace, we've got brand-new marketing ideas fresh in our minds, and we won't have to rush or be stressed out. As an added bonus, we've got a full stash of empty cookie boxes to use as crafting supplies. 

Y'all, our plan worked BRILLIANTLY! The meeting was relaxed and low-stress, the kids had tons of ideas, and I've got the comfy feeling of knowing that we'll be going into our next cookie season with almost all of our materials already created and ready to go.

During this post-cookie season meeting, Seniors earned the My Cookie Network badge and Ambassadors earned the Cookie Influencer badge.

Pre-Meeting Prep Work

Before the meeting, I ordered the badges, printed photos of the troop doing cool stuff over the years, bought postcard stamps, formed an agreement with our local animal shelter that they would love to have the corrugated cardboard cat scratchers we wanted to make, and met up with various other troop leaders here and anon to take their empty corrugated cardboard cookie cases off their hands. 

As a Little Brownie Bakers troop, the kids really wanted to taste-test the ABC Bakers cookies. We also had a brand-new cookie this year, the Raspberry Rally, that NOBODY had tasted because it hadn't been available for in-person sales! Raspberry Rally was only available as a shipped cookie, during a specific ordering window only, so my night owl teenager got onto the troop's Digital Cookie site at 12:01 am opening day and ordered us some Raspberry Rallies.

Good thing she did, because by 9:00 am other parents and troop leaders were already in the Facebook group griping that it was sold out!

I asked around my Craft Knife Facebook page to find someone whose kid was an ABC Bakers Girl Scout, and I bought the troop a selection of ABC Bakers cookies that we could compare to our Little Brownie Bakers cookies.

My own Girl Scout had to miss most of this meeting, so to earn the part of the Cookie Influencer badge that she'd miss, she baked the Original Girl Scout Cookie, using the original recipe, to share with the rest of the troop during the meeting.

Step 1: Become an authority in your cookie business.

Because kids were earning two levels of badges simultaneously, we ended up doing activities somewhere in the middle. When these Girl Scout Seniors level up and want to earn the Ambassador badge, we'll just do different activities!

To be an expert in the Girl Scout cookie business, you need to know all about your cookies--how they look, how they smell, how they taste. You should also know how to compare/contrast them with other cookies from the same bakery and the other bakery, and other commercial and homemade cookies.

We taste-tested my teenager's homemade original recipe Girl Scout cookies, both so we would know how those original cookies tasted and how they compare to their closest cousin, the Trefoil. 

Here's the original Girl Scout cookie recipe. The dough wants to be sticky, but refrigerate it instead of adding extra flour, or your finished cookies will be bland. It's impossible to make a truly authentic recreation, however, and your Girl Scouts should try to guess why!

Do YOU know? It's because none of these ingredients are the same as they were way back in 1922! Your eggs, milk, and butter were farm-fresh and unpasteurized, organic and grass-fed. Your sugar was made from beets, not sugar cane. Even flour manufacturing has changed numerous times since then. Also, ovens! This cookie recipe calls for a "quick oven," which most modern interpretations set at about 350 degrees, but there weren't thermometers, so cooks just sort of figured out a method and used their own experiences to set the temperature, which would also have fluctuated constantly.

We also taste-tested the Raspberry Rallies, and surprisingly, nobody was a fan! Some kids thought they would taste better frozen (we LOVE frozen Thin Mints in this troop!), and I personally thought they would have been delicious with a raspberry jam layer. But alas, they were just Thin Mints with raspberry flavoring instead of mint. And interestingly, my council has ALREADY sent out an announcement that we won't be selling them next year! Goodbye, Raspberry Rallies--we hardly knew ye!

The main event, however, was the Blindfolded Taste Test. I brought enough bandanas so that each person who wanted to play could have their own, and a couple of kids who didn't want to play helped me. The taste-testers blindfolded themselves, and the helpers and I donned disposable gloves (we use these for all our Girl Scout food prep!) and set dueling cookies before each taste-tester. The only tricky thing to remember is which baker you put on which side! When we'd handed out the two cookies for that round, the taste-testers sampled them both and announced 1) which cookie was more delicious, and 2) which cookie they thought was our Little Brownie Baker version vs. which was the ABC Baker version.

This activity was so fun for everyone! Of course, it only works when the cookies from different bakeries look identical, so it didn't work for, say, Thin Mints, which are smooth when they come from Little Brownie Bakers but crinkly when they come from ABC Bakers--

--but for Trefoils, Do-Si-Dos vs. Peanut Butter Sandwiches, Samoas vs. Caramel deLites, Tagalongs vs. Peanut Butter Patties, and Adventurefuls, they're similar enough that you can't tell them apart without looking very closely... which you can't do when you're blindfolded, mwa-ha-ha!

Our troop of cookie experts had a lot of fun comparing and contrasting and mostly--but not always!--guessing our own cookies correctly, and we had plenty of leftovers so that everyone could take more samples to taste-test home with them.

Step 2: Set cookie business goals and develop a new skill.

After the taste-testing, we spent the rest of the meeting working on these various projects while chatting and munching cookies!

At our Girl Scout cookie booths, the kids sometimes use posters and sometimes don't, but unlike some of our other decorations, we don't really have a good stash of ready-to-go posters. Time to fix that! I set out quarter-sheets of posterboard, along with lots of photos of our troop doing cool stuff over the years, and markers, pencils, glue sticks, etc. The kids could work individually or in groups, with the goal of making posters each tightly focused on one NON-COOKIE theme. 

Because do you know why people buy Girl Scout cookies even if they're not super revved up about the cookies?

They buy cookies to support Girl Scouts! So kids who can talk confidently about what they want to do with their cookie profits, as well as show off all the cool stuff they've already done with their cookie profits, inspire the people who want to support Girl Scouts to support them even more. It's also good for the kids to remember the purpose of all the hard work they put in selling cookies, as well as to celebrate all their awesome adventures.

And on this day, the kids made some great posters! Now we've got posters about camping, about high adventure, about friendship, and about our troop trip to Mexico that we can mix and match at cookie booths. Since they're smaller, we can set up a couple at a time, even, and I think they'll be interesting enough to draw eyes to them... and over to the kids' cookie booth!

Step 3: Create and share your value proposition.

The activities we did for Steps 2-4 could be swapped to meet any of these steps, to be honest, because a good marketing campaign is multi-faceted. So just as those posters do a wonderful job sharing the kids' value propositions, it turned out that making, writing, and sending postcards made from upcycled Girl Scout cookie boxes enabled many of the kids to learn a new skill!

Tell me: do YOUR Girl Scouts know how to write, address, and stamp a postcard? Because many of mine didn't! It took some of them a few tries to get everything laid out properly, so even better that we were using perfectly free, easily recyclable materials!

For this activity, the kids each picked a couple of the troop's shipped cookies customers and wrote them a personal thank-you note. They thanked them, said something they learned during cookie sales or something they'd use their cookie profits for, and finished with something else thankful that wasn't a thank-you. This was also a good time to sign the troop thank-you notes that we give, along with a box of Girl Scout cookies, to businesses that let us have a cookie booth on their property. For those thank-you notes, I mount a cute troop photo to a trefoil that I cut out of green paper, then just have the kids sign the back. It's cute, quick, and easy!

Step 4: Create a marketing campaign.

All of this is part of an integrated marketing campaign, but for this specific step, I got the kids to stock the troop back up with decorated donation cans. At each cookie booth we have one donation can for donating cookies to charity (for the past couple of years, our troop has been donating cookies to the city's emergency youth shelter), and one donation can for donating money straight to our troop. I don't understand why these donation cans get SO beat up over the course of a Girl Scout cookie season, but OMG we are constantly needing to replace donation cans! On top of that, we try to keep at least two full cookie booth set-ups to make busy selling weekends easier, so we're looking at six new donation cans nearly every single year.

Fun fact: the only correct donation cans are either 1) a plastic protein powder canister or 2) a giant plastic peanut butter jar. In my top photo, I don't know what that can on the right is, but it's not going to last, sigh.

Step 5: Leave a legacy.

It's important to pay good works forward, so just as the community supports these kids by buying Girl Scout cookies from them, the kids also give back to the community in other ways. We've got our yearly cookie donation to the youth emergency shelter, but this year, I also thought it would be nice to upcycle some of our massive pile of cardboard waste by creating these corrugated cardboard cat scratchers for our local animal shelter.

Look how many the kids were able to make during the course of just one meeting!

I'd love to find a way to encourage the troop to make more cat scratchers independently during the course of the next cookie season, because we have SO much cardboard waste, but I don't know--they're pretty time-consuming, and teenagers are the busiest people I know!

The kids LOVED this meeting, and it worked really well in so many ways: we got a lot of genuinely productive work done, we did some charity work, we ate delicious snacks, we got to be creative, we looked at cute pictures of our troop over the years and went, "Awww!", we had plenty of time to chat while our hands were busy, and we learned new things like how to address a postcard and how Peanut Butter Patties taste just a little different from Tagalongs. 

I hope our upcoming meeting, in which we're going to plan a Harvest badge to earn, start planning a big 2024 troop trip, and get several kids started on their Gold Award paperwork, goes just as well!

DIY Cat Scratcher from Upcycled Corrugated Cardboard Boxes

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

This upcycled cardboard cat scratcher is a great way to use up all your corrugated cardboard boxes. Cats love it, and it's a useful donation to your local animal shelter.

There comes a time in every person's life when they find themselves simply awash with cardboard. Maybe you just finished unpacking from your latest move. Maybe you went a little too ham on the most recent gift-giving holiday. Maybe your Girl Scout troop sold 2,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies and now you have 250 empty cookie cases to show for it.

Whatever the situation that has left you with too much corrugated cardboard, I have the perfect solution: an upcycled cardboard cat scratcher!

Cats LOVE this style of cat scratcher, and it's a great one to make for them because it's eco-friendly on both ends: use upcycled cardboard to make it, and recycle it when you're done with it. Make a few of these cat scratchers and tuck them around your space so your cat never has an excuse to sharpen their claws on your furniture. If you don't have cats, make these cat scratchers anyway and donate them to your local animal shelter. My local animal shelter specifically requests this style, and my Girl Scout troop enjoys making and donating them.

This cat scratcher is an improved version of the two types that I made back in 2020. In the years since, I've refined my style to what my own cats and the animal shelter prefer, and redesigned the scratcher to be sturdier and more easily recyclable. My own cats do still really like that round one from the 2020 tutorial, and that's a great style if you've got a lot of room to devote to a nice, big cat scratcher. This version here, though, has a more inconspicuous profile, transports better, and my local animal shelter says it works better in their cat enclosures.

To make this upcycled cardboard cat scratcher, you will need:

• lots of corrugated cardboard. If you're using Girl Scout cookie cases, you'll need about five per cat scratcher. Otherwise, prepare to cut up more cardboard than you thought you'd need--this cat scratcher uses a LOT!
• measuring and cutting tools. At the minimum, you need a ruler and a pair of sturdy scissors. The work will go quicker with a quilting ruler, self-healing cutting mat, and craft knife.
• hot glue gun and hot glue. You're not going to use much, but this is still an essential component.

Step 1: Cut the bottom off of a box.

Choose a cardboard box whose area at the bottom has the dimensions that you're looking for in a cat scratcher.

Measure 2" up from the bottom of the box all the way around, then cut. Reserve the rest of the box for Step 2.

The bottom of this box will be the base for your cat scratcher.

If necessary, reinforce the bottom box flaps with hot glue.

Step 2: Cut corrugated cardboard into strips.

Flatten and/or disassemble a corrugated cardboard box, then examine it to see which way to cut. You want to cut across the corrugations, not parallel to them. When you cut, the cut edge of the box should show a cross-section of the corrugations--that's what the kitties love to dig their claws into!

Use a ruler and craft knife to cut a 2" wide strip down the cardboard, then repeat until you've cut up the entire box. Recycle or repurpose any leftover cardboard.

Measure the length of your box bottom, and cut the cardboard strips to this length. Recycle/repurpose any end pieces that don't reach the correct length.

Continue cutting cardboard into strips until you have enough strips to completely fill the box bottom. If you're making these from Girl Scout cookie cases, it takes about five cases, including the one you cut the box bottom from, to make this cat scratcher.

Step 3: Insert strips into the box bottom, gluing as you go.

After you've got enough strips, dump them all out of the box bottom and set up the hot glue gun. Lightly glue the strips together as you reinsert them.

This is my biggest improvement over the 2020 version of this cat scratcher; when the strips weren't glued together, I found that occasionally my cats would snag their claws into one and pull it out of the box! THIS cat scratcher keeps all its strips nice and snug inside for ultimate cat scratching perfection.

Step 4 (optional): Glue the cat scratcher to the base.

If you want to make the cat scratcher REALLY sturdy, then after all the strips are glued together, carefully pry the whole thing out of the box bottom, then use hot glue to lightly glue it back in. This will keep even the most enthusiastic cat from pulling the entire cat scratcher out of its base.

Either way, the added beauty of this corrugated cardboard cat scratcher is that it's DOUBLE-SIDED! When a cat has worn one side of the scratcher down, carefully pry it out of the base (the hot glue should peel away fairly easily, if you weren't too enthusiastic when you glued it), flip it over, and reinsert it, re-gluing it as necessary.

The model for this tutorial is Dill, one of the three-week-old kittens plus mama cat (also in some pics) that I'm currently fostering for my local animal shelter. I'll keep them safe and happy here with me until the kittens weigh at least two pounds and are at least eight weeks old, and then I'll bring everyone back to be speutered and adopted. Kittens this young don't do well in a shelter setting, and foster families are crucial to their survival, well-being, and proper socialization. If you've got space in your living area and your heart, please reach out to your local shelter and ask about their foster programs

This is one of my all-time favorite upcycling projects. It's a nearly-waste-free way to turn trash into treasure, it fills an incredibly useful niche in cat gear that you'd otherwise have to buy new, and it's a simple, cheap donation project that directly benefits the most innocent creatures in your local community.

I challenge you (and me!) to make every unwanted corrugated cardboard box that comes into our lives into a cat scratcher for use or donation.