The hooded basket appears to be superior: Tamerlane kept looking enviously at Scaramouche's basket, and would occasionally try to sit in his brother's basket. Scaramouche would then whap his little brother about the head until Tamerlane gave up and left. So I made a hood for Tamerlane's basket:
This is a quick hack job. I sewed together scraps of fleece left from another project, folded the fleece around two layers of flexible foam furniture padding, inserted a piece of coathanger wire for the arched side and whipped on a zipper for the basket edge side. In the above photo you can see where I still need to add a couple of snaps to the hood, as the zipper wasn't quite long enough. My sewing machine had no problem stitching through fleece plus foam (I did use the longest straight stitch and a 100/16 needle). Since fleece ravels negligibly, I did zero finishing on the edges.
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| the patched-together inside surface |
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| the outside |
The hardest part was cutting the coat hanger. My little crafting wire snips were not really up to a coat hanger. The coat hanger was brittle, though, so once I started a cut I just bent the wire back and forth until it snapped at the weakened point. A heavy-duty wire cutter would be nice.
There wasn't enough fleece to completely cover the plastic: you can see the plastic lining on the back side. It's not a pretty job. But Tamerlane seems okay with it, so I'm calling it good enough.
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