Striped Double-thick Beanie

Who doesn't like a stripe? This beanie is thick and warm enough even for temperatures down to about 20 below, or 40 below if you're exercising hard. It's too thick to fit under a helmet, but sometimes all you want is a cozy, warm hat, and that's what this is. Not scratchy---so there's no need for that funky pile lining.

The repeating stripes are light grey, dark grey, and blue, and it looks fantastic.


A little background info on the possum wool:

About a decade before the Civil War, somebody from Australia brought a brushtail possum (we have the scary tooth rat-tailed kind) over to New Zealand, and since there are no predators in New Zealand, there are now, in 2009, more than 70 million of them.

They eat more than 20 tons of vegetation every night of the year, and it's the good, friendly, native kind of vegetation that provides homes and food for New Zealand's native wildlife, including the Kiwi. The loss of habitat alone is bad enough, but of course it has the expected consequences on native animals, many of whom are facing extinction now. Even vegan nature lovers would like to see these possums wiped out, but they propagate too fast for that, and so the government has subsidized their "capture" and businesses that make stuff from their supersoft, non-smelly, quite mink-like and warmer than merino wool fluff.

We've sold possum wool garments before, and several of the old-timers here still wear them every winter. It stays soft, washes well (don't dry it), and holds up. It's 40 percent possum, 50 percent Merino, 10 percent nylon.