Cat In The Hat

A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law messaged me. She was out shopping and had picked up a book that she thought I would like. “What kind of book?” I asked. She sent me a photo of herself holding it. The picture was a little out of focus, but it was a cat. The cat was wearing a hat. “It’s a book about making hats for cats,” she responded. How cool is that? I thought. I can learn how to crochet, or knit or something. Maybe I could make a bunch of hats and sell them at the market. I’m no stranger to the textile arts, if you may recall, having halfway completed a patchwork quilt for my daughter before giving up completely and letting my neighbour finish it. And when I was a teenager, I knit myself not only a scarf, but also a whole sweater. It took months, but I did it, and now, I could see myself in the wing chair by the fire, merrily making head cozies for kitties.

And then yesterday, my brother and my nephew came for a quick visit.

Nephew: Hi, Auntie Susu. Mom said to give you this.
Me: Oh, my cat hat book! I can’t wait to start knitting little cat hats.
Nephew: Uh…I don’t think you knit them.

He pointed to the cover. There, above the very large title Hats For Cats: How To Craft Fetching Headgear For Your Feline Friends, was a much smaller title that read “Cat-Hair”. The book is “Cat-Hair Hats For Cats”. Yes, the entire book, all 136 pages of it, was how to design and create hats for your cat using their own cat hair—collecting it, rolling it up, and then shaping into…hats. For your cat. The authors of the book describe themselves as a “fun-loving couple from Japan” who use the hair from their two cats to make hats and then make their cats wear their own hair as fashion accessories. Except one of their cats died 4 years ago, and they still use his hats and put them on other cats’ heads, which I suppose is no different from a human wearing a human hair wig, the hair from which belonged to someone who died, which I imagine happens more than we would care to know about. The introduction to the book ends with the statement “Making these hats has become our life’s work”. According to the book, they’ve made more than 160 hats to date, and all I can say about that is HOW MUCH HAIR DO YOUR CATS LOSE?!

There are several chapters, including ‘Animal Hats: Transform your cat into different animals’, like cows, elephants, and koala bears. There are Birthday Hats, Graduation Hats, Holiday Hats, and one called The Coonskin Hat, like it’s not bad enough that you’re putting your cat’s own dead hair on its own head, but now you’re shaping it like roadkill?

But the best section was Character Hats, with the perennial favourite and everyone’s obvious choice: Amelia Earhart, a hat with aviator goggles made out of cat hair with the recommendation that you can finish the outfit off with a jaunty red scarf.

And I’m not trying to make fun of this book (well, maybe just a little), because it’s obvious that the people who put it together WORSHIP their cats, and to be honest, after going through this entire book, it IS kind of adorable in its own weird way. Just like me. And now, since I no longer have a cat, I’ll need to go to my neighbours’ houses on a pretense and secretly brush their cats because The Princess Leia is something no cat can live without.

Ho F*cking Ho

47 thoughts on “Cat In The Hat”

  3. I know from experience that one cat can shed about three cats worth of hair in about a year. Everything in my house is covered with black cat hair from Ody and his two erstwhile black cat brothers. And my garage is littered with broken vacuum that cried “uncle!” trying to pick it all up…

    As for cat hair hats themselves…. I’d actually like the idea if I weren’t so anti-dressing pets up like kids or dolls.

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  4. That is truly weird. I mean I don’t have social media of my own and there is pretty weird shit on there but cat hair hats for cats? Bizarre beyond the word. Charlie and Wayne agree, they’d never wear hats made of their own fur.

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  5. My wife knits and because of that I not only have a fantastic collection of hats and socks I’ve also gotten to see the process of making yarn up close and it is extremely long and tedious. Not that I’m criticizing—I think it’s admirable that some people commit themselves to it. But I can’t imagine the amount of work needed to make yarn from pet hair. I’m still thinking about it, though, but Dalmatian hair is very short and coarse, not good for knitting at all, which is why Cruella DeVil only kidnapped puppies.

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  7. A more efficient means to produce cat yarn (isn’t all yarn cat yarn?) would be to shear them. Bzzzzzzz. “Now, let me knit you a sweater from your own fur. Don’t you look darling!”
    Grrrrrrrr.

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  12. You just gave me my first laugh of the morning! Not only can I not imagine /making/ these hats, I can’t imagine getting any cat to wear them! Ok, correction: I can’t imagine any of my cats wearing them. 😀

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  17. Um, yeah. There’s no way to overstate how strange the human species is, is there? We did have a cat who lost enough fur when I brushed her that I used to wonder if I couldn’t save it up and make an extra cat, but the mechanics of that were more than I could manage. Hats, though? Cats weren’t made to wear hats. I’m just sure of that, and the orange cat looks pretty pissed off about it all.

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