Survival Crafts: DIY Pet Harness

Welcome to one of my most popular posts, a holdover from my brief attempt at becoming a craft blogger. I know you’re here to learn how to crochet your own pet harness, but if you’re a fan of quirky paranormal romance, contemporary fantasy or horror fiction, have a look around! You can check out my books, learn more about my world on my blog (spoiler: not a craft blog) and, if you like what you see, you can subscribe to my newsletter for even more free, fun content. Thanks for reading. On to the harness!

Recently when putting together a bug-out bag for my pets (more on that in a later post), I realized that I needed harnesses for each of my three cats. We have carriers for each of them, but once we get to our bug-out location we don’t want to keep them crated the whole time, and we don’t know how safe it will be to let them run around unsupervised. But faced with no money to go out and buy three harness and leash combos, I turned instead to my massive yarn stash, and to the Internet, where I was sure I’d find instructions on how to make some harnesses.

The Internet didn’t fail me. A simple Google search turned up this simple crochet pattern for a leash and harness combo. Since I sometimes make jewelry, I already had the jump rings on hand for joining the two, so all I needed was the time to whip up three of these babies. I got them done over the course of three evenings of watching Cheers reruns on Netflix with my husband.

I modified the pattern a bit by following one of the suggestions in the pattern’s comments to add a front strap connecting the two loops to keep the neck loop from riding up and add a degree of difficulty when it comes to escape. I can’t exactly say that the finished product is a hit with the kitties; when I tried them on, they each reacted by either just lying down and giving up on life altogether or by trying their darnedest to back out of the thing. But they didn’t get out of it, and the fit seemed to be comfortable enough. When the weather warms up we’ll start having practice outings to try to get the poor dears used to being leash-walked.

By the way, if you’d like to learn how to knit and/or crochet — both handy skills to have in a post-grid situation — head over to The Survival Mom’s web site, where she has a list of links to online lessons on yarn craft.