possum to the people

my friends are awesome. really, really awesome.

one of them did me a huge favor regarding a certain pair of bright red eyeglasses, which pretty much made me break down and weep because i was so moved (see, i do have feelings after all). anyway, i couldn’t decide how to thank her until i went to a local yarn store with some other business and saw this beautiful eco-friendly black yarn that was super soft and had some curious grey fibers sticking out of it. so i thought, i’ll make her a pair of fingerless mitts, because my ultimate goal in life is to make her look like a homeless person. no. wait. that didn’t come out right.

i made her a pair of these…

with this.

wait. go back. what’s that there, the 30 % part?

possum? as in, i-have-a-pointy-nose-and-hang-upside-down-from-my-tail-because-i-can’t-be-bothered-to-stand-on-my-feet possum?

yup. apparently there’s a huge eco-disaster looming out in new zealand because possums, which some douchebag brought from australia in hopes of becoming some major fur honcho, destroy trees and eat birds and do all kinds of shit they’re not particularly welcome to do. so people out there are trying to eradicate them by shooting them with bazookas or whatever (no one wants to tell me how they actually do it but i always love the idea of bazookas), and once the buggy-eyed bastards are dead they make yarn out of ’em. which i totally support. if there’s such a thing as eco-friendly yarn, this is it. really. everybody wins. except, you know, possums. because they’re dead.

the yarn really is soft, softer than alpaca in my opinion. some guy somewhere with too much time has measured the possum fibers with a fancy microscope thingy and concludes that it’s physically impossible for it not to be soft, because the fibers taper down to 1 microns, which is well below the human ability to sense. so no “prickle factor”. i love that word.

the mitts themselves are very basic, but the material is curious enough as it is. so curious, in fact, that from now on i will only wear things made out of possum hair, because unless you wear possum, YOU ARE DESTROYING NEW ZEALAND.