Once upon a time, I knitted some adorable Christmas trees that use a wine cork as the “trunk” …. and was completely unable to use them as decoration because my cats thought they were great fun to play with. So I created this pattern to give the cats their own wine-cork toys that would stay in one piece, so that I wouldn’t find myself stepping on a cork in one corner of the room and a bit of knitting in the opposite corner. The resulting toys have the Feline Seal of Approval from my own Macchiato and Oolong as well as a friend’s cat, but if you really want to generate an enthusiastic response, you can always “marinate” the toy in a bag of catnip for a day or two before giving it to your cat.

This is a great way to use up a small bit of leftover sock yarn – it uses only a couple of grams of yarn – and a wine cork, because let’s face it, you were never going to find anything to do with all those corks anyway!

You will need 2-5 grams of sock yarn and a cork from a wine bottle. Gauge is not very important for this pattern - it just needs to be big enough to fit the cork inside, and the cabling is stretchy anyway.