Japanese Cool Cats Wear Hats Made From Their Own Fur

Japanese couple Ryo Yamazaki and his wife Hiromi like cats. And they like their hair. Really like it.
So much so that they’ve taken up making hats for cats…and they are hats made from the hair of cats themselves! (Yes, we know, even Dr. Seuss is having fun with that one!)
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The pair has three Scottish Fold cats, and Hiromi uses their sheddings as the media for which adorable (though the cats may beg to differ!) hats for their cats, while Ryo photographs them and turns them into viral hilarity art. People can’t get enough of the cats wearing their hats, and already the pair has 80,000 followers looking for the latest fashions.
One of the more than 100 hats is wizard-inspired, while others look like rabbits. The cats are different colors, which means there are different shades of caps, and the couple says each hat takes about 15 minutes or so to make.
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Hiromi says they first were playing with sheddings in 2016 when they fashioned a cat-wig on one of their kittehs. Saying the cats didn’t mind (maybe they had concerns about baldness and were glad for the hair back?), they decided to play around with some designs.
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Now, the fashionistas have inspired others to use the cat hair as hats, or to even use cat hair instead of sheep wool since you can felt it the same as you do with wood. Cat molt can be made into dolls or even embroidery for scarves, though felters should know that cat hair more brittle than wool, though.
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They’ve started a trend, though, as Hideko Tsujii is a professional hat designer who uses her dog’s fur to felt hats and berets. She has an online shop, and mixes sheep’s wool with the hair to make sure that it’s felt-able. She believes that dogs are thrilled that their hair is used to warm their owner’s heads, as they are such human pleasers.
One client of Tsujii’s lost a Lucky, her dog of 17 years, in 2010, but had been collecting Lucky’s hair for five years and gave it to Tsujii to make a hat. She feels like she has Lucky by her side when she wears it.
Maybe the Yamazaki cats feel like they are more in tune with themselves when they are wearing their own fur on their head?

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