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Photo via CatDollRoom/Jugem.jp Remix by Jason Reed

Why you need to be following Japan’s giant, wearable cat heads

This guy is living the dream making giant cat heads out of felt.

 

Colette Bennett

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Posted on Apr 28, 2016   Updated on May 26, 2021, 9:10 pm CDT

If you are a cat lover (or an Internet culture lover, or both, really) and haven’t started following Needle Felted Cats on Twitter yet, you should probably start.

Looks like a shopped photo, doesn’t it? It’s not. The head is real, and completely made of wool felt. It’s also not the only one.

There’s two appropriate reactions at this point: Yell “DEAR GOD NO” and to run out of the room, or the cock your head sideways and mutter, “I have to get one of those.” If you’re in the second category, there’s a school in Japan where you can go to learn to make these yourself.

Japan School of Wool Art is located in central Tokyo in the Chūō ward, and offers lessons from three “feline” instructors that can teach you to needle-felt everything from your own giant cat head to kittens posting with clandestine charm.

Housetu Sato, the school’s resident needle-felting sensei, even has his own Facebook account if you want to keep up with the original cat head’s adventures.

While the first cat head got a lot of attention in 2015, no one has talked about it much since, even though the school keeps making cat things that dangle their paws right over the edge of the uncanny valley. The newest head in the collection? An orange tabby, naturally.

We’ll take 12, please.

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*First Published: Apr 28, 2016, 5:10 pm CDT