Cloth (fleece) Homemade RattyRat's Review: When you use cloth with your rats, you always want to use short fibered cloth like fleece. If you use things like cotton, long strings of fiber could develop where ever your rats chew on the cloth, and these long strings can get tangled and tied around parts of your rats as they nest and play in the cloth, causing serious injury or even death. The first time we attempted to use cloth, we cut fleece into two inch strips and then used that like litter in the bottom of our cage. This was a huge mistake because it took forever to pick and clean all the poops off of the strips of fleece to wash them and switch them out. Very bad idea. Our second attempt went much better for the martins cage we had, which is shown above. What we did is cut a layer of linoleum to cover the wire floor on each level, used a very small fleece blanket folded up for the bottom tray, and then sewed a double/triple layer of fleece to fit each shelf over the linoleum (the double/triple layer helped keep it in place, because it was thicker, so the rats didn't bunch it up easily or pull it off a level.) You might be able to get away without sewing the fleece together, just stack two or three layers on top of each other and see. We sewed them together so the rats couldn't pull them all apart. As a single thick piece we found the rats left it alone, because it was too big and thick to be used as nesting material. We had two sets of the fleece fit for the cage and just changed it out every other day to wash. It was easy as pie! The best solution we've found for a martins cage.