Muffin Boy

When der Dekan moved in here end of June 2021, I decided to give bead looming a break.
This was one crazy kitten growing into a crazy cat. He doesn't do things by halves. When he sleeps, he turns into a big heavy sand bag that is really hard to move. His sleep is so deep sometimes that I can softly roll him off my legs, for example, and he will only wake up after the roll when touching the bed, sometimes not even right away.

When he has what I call "his five minutes", even if it can take much longer, he's insufferable. He throws tantrums and he throws things off shelves, the wardrobe, the nightstand or tries to knock certain pictures off the wall. It can mean he's hungry because the portion was too small or the food was obviously unacceptable (even if two days ago it was the best food he ever had - that's cats for you).
It can also just be too much energy, though, the kind of energy that ordinary playtime is not enough for.
Those five minutes can end as abruptly as they started or they can take forever, at all times of day or night. They don't happen every day, but when they do, it can be exhausting with that little whirlwind because he knows exactly which buttons to push! I'm quite easy to train and he's has always been fast at learning what works on me.
He looks harmless enough here, but actually this was shortly before he jumped on the wardrobe to knock down one of my Steiff fish.

What I'm trying to explain is that not all crafts are safe around him when he's awake and it's not necessarily predictable when he's going to jump all over the place, try to steal things - he can be amazingly stealthy and fast - and open bead cups to step in are not that good an idea, either.
Even Ponder and Esme, who loved walking across my bead tray with the bead cups, had one or the other mishap, but that usually just meant a few beads. They were both big jumpers, but amazingly well-behaved around my beads and I never worried around them much. Ponder's weakness was my wire, but that's a lot easier to deal with than tiny flying beads.

Since der Dekan has been living and jumping here, I managed to make two bead loomed pieces and I worked from very tiny stacks of beads which I refilled from the tubes constantly which didn't exactly made looming any quicker or real fun.
The other day I talked about bead cups and bead trays with a friend and she said it was a pity there weren't bead trays with holes for the cups to put in.
Unlike other beaders I don't work from a bead mat which has to do with my not working at a table.
I keep my bead cups to the side and pick the beads up with my fingers from where I put them on my needle. That may sound very awkward to others, but it works perfectly for me and I'm actually faster that way than with a bead mat.

Of course I know there are also all kinds of bead organizers, but they are quite flat and I don't trust somecat around that.
That's when I thought of my muffin trays (I got two of them at a super sale at the outlet, but only ever used one, anyway).
What if I tried putting the beads in there to keep them all together instead of using individual cups? And what if I found a box to fit the tray in to minimize the danger of a not so little cat stepping on one side of the tray and send it up flying?

It was practically a miracle that there was a parcel I hadn't opened up yet, otherwise I would have thrown the box out already. It looked the perfect size - and it was.
I cut off the flaps, but not completely, so the edges of the muffin tray would rest on them. It would have been nice if the tray had a hole on either side to attach it to the box, but it doesn't, so I used double sided tape.
To make the whole construction heavier and thus more stable, I had put a thermos I don't use anymore into the box. I wrapped it up in thick paper and added bubble wrap on the sides, so it won't move around.

Here you see Muffin Boy check it out because nothing here can go unsupervised by him. He's probably making plans now how to deal with this new challenge.

I think I can safely say that this is the weirdest piece of beading "equipment" I have ever put together and it's definitely not beautiful. If it works, though, I finally might be able to go back to work with more bead colors again without being stressed out too much and that's all that counts.

A lid for the tray would be perfect, but I couldn't find anything that worked and I don't want to buy a new tray just for the lid.
Maybe another box? Wait, I could just put my second muffin tray over it 😂
Anyhow, I'll let you know how it goes.