Kaori Tsutaya - Crafting with Cat Hair: Cute Handicrafts to Make with Your Cat

Originally published in Japan as Nekoke feruto no hon in 2009 by Asuka Shinsha, Inc.
Nekoke feruto no hon Kaori Tsutaya
Motto nekoke feruto no hon Kaori Tsutaya
English translation rights arranged with ASUKA SHINSHA CO. through Japan UNI Agency, Inc., Tokyo
Kaori Tsutaya 2009

First published in the United States in 2011 by Quirk Productions, Inc.
Translation Quirk Productions, Inc.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication number: 2011922699

eBook ISBN: 978-1-59474-689-5
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59474-525-6

Photography by Akihito Gotoh
Additional photographs by Kaori Tsutaya
Production management by John J. McGurk

Quirk Books
215 Church St.
Philadelphia, PA 19106
quirkbooks.com

v3.1

The author expresses special thanks to Yoko Katayama, Ritsuko Kamonoshita, Yukiko Kojima, Masaki Shinohara, Yuki Sugeno, Kazumasa and Michiyo Suzuki, Kazuo and Yukiko Sekine, Yoshimi Takeuchi, Yoshiro and Mitsuko Tamura, Chizuru Matsuoka, and Hiroyoshi Yasuda.

No cats were harmed in the making of this book.

All cat hair that appears in this book was collected by gentle brushing. When crafting with your cat, it is important to remove hair only by gentle brushing. Do not shave your cat.

Your cats hair is not for sale. Keep your beloved cats hair for your own personal use.

Please see this for more information on making sure your crafts are kind and gentle and cat-friendly.

If you have a cat around the house, you too can make these simple handicrafts to show the affection you have for your pet!

Upon first glance at this book, anyone might think, Cat-hair crafts? What the heck ? But its really quite simple. If youre like me, youve noticed that a lot of hair comes off when you brush your cat. And at the start of summer, the average cat sheds enough of its thick coat in one day to amount to a double handful of cat hair. My cat Chi shed so much that I often worried, If youre shedding this much every day, are you going to disappear?!

And so, with all this extra cat hair around the house, I had a thought. If I collected all this cat hair, I could make felt out of it.

Felt is easy to make. You just entwine fibers and then compress them. A lot of soft felt handicrafts are made out of sheeps wool. So why not make super-soft felt handicrafts out of cat hair in much the same way? I wondered if it could be done. To try it out, the first handicrafts I made were cat-hair finger puppets.

Ill admit that as I was making them I thought, Is it really okay to make something like this out of my cats hair? But in the end the finished product looked so much like my own cat that I got a big laugh out of it! I was happy to be able to get some use out of my cats hair as a crafting material.

I wrote Crafting with Cat Hair so that I could share the fun and happiness these cute cat crafts have brought me. I hope that everyone reading this book will be able to make their own one-of-a-kind crafts out of their cats hair, which might otherwise go to waste.

Kaori Tsutaya

Can I really make crafts with my cats hair?

Making stuff with cat hair is easy. But if youre wondering whether or not you can do it, here are answers to some frequently asked questions.

Q: I have a shorthaired cat. Can I still make crafts?

A: Dont worry. Some of the cats who contributed hair to the projects in this book are also shorthaired cats. Read their stories .

Q: The hair that I collect from my cat isnt a very pretty color.

A: To tell you the truth, most cat hair doesnt look very pretty. But when you make it into the shape of a cat, it looks really cute. And you can make something really wonderful looking when you add a pretty colored thread or wool collar. I explain more about the color of cat hair .