NO need to worry, now, when your beloved pet cat or dog pops its clogs. It can live on as a teddy bear!
All you need is a bag of its fur or hair and Chan Brown will spin it in to a bear - or a hat, brooch or other 'hair-loom.'
"Sadly, our pets don't last our lifetime but the teddies last longer than any of us," says Chan, from Chesterfield.
"People start out asking for teddies as a novelty but they become a memorial."
You may have seen the 61-year-old grandmother spinning away at the Bakewell Show recently.
The hair is collected when the animal is groomed, then cleaned and spun into yarn on a spinning wheel. "There's no doggy smell when it leaves me," she laughs.
It's not just hair from cats and dogs but foxes, donkeys, chinchillas and rabbits have all finished up as bears or brooches.
The bears are traditional string jointed bears stuffed with washed sheep's fleece.
Chan, who runs a business called Pet-Hair Bears, started knitting when she was seven and got into crochet in her twenties, making clothes for her own babies.
She saw an exhibition of spinning in Castleton in 1985 and her husband Alan bought her first a spindle then, five weeks later, her first spinning wheel.
At first she went the traditional route, using fleeces from sheep, alpaca and llama. But when she researched the history of her craft she realised that pet hair was once commonly used.
Leftover hair is turned into brooches (at £2.50) or small hairy animals (£5) which she sells to raise money for the Derbyshire Association for the Blind.
If you fancy hair from Fido or Tiddles turned into a natty hat, prices are from a fiver.
Chan's example has encouraged other women to start spinning and she has founded the Arkwright Spinsters group which meets on the third Sunday of the month at Arkwright's Mill visitor centre, Cromford.
In 20 years of spinning Chan has dealt with the hair of most animals. But, strangely, one still eludes her.
"I'd like to have a go at guinea pig hair but no one's ever asked me," she says.
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FeaturesMore business newsMore Rotherham newsMore Doncaster newsMore Barnsley newsThe full article contains 409 words and appears in Sheffield Star newspaper.
