Hat Making!

In the month of February 2010, with all our exams over and done with, the time had come for having fun, with learning something new. PSBB’s Global School Partnerships program had gone one step further. After months of interactions over the internet, our friends from Reepham High school in England visited us on a student and teacher internship program. We spent a few days, getting to know them, showing them how our school functions and compared it to the kind of schooling they received at Reepham.

The teachers as well as their students sat through our classes and interactive sessions – and in one such session, I was given the opportunity of being a part of it. And this time, it we were learning from Reepham High teachers. We were making hats. This was quite unusual for us, but that’s what we were taught – “How to make different hats.” Having been given the choice of a beanie, an Irish hat, a castle hat or a Cat hat, I chose the last option - the cat hat.

Miss Dianne, the textiles teacher headed the session. We all got chart paper stencils, which we used to cut the cloth in our desired shape. Miss Dianne being a very patient person helped us with our difficulties one by one. She strolled around the class; making sure everyone (120 of us) got it right. The next step was the basic stitch- though it was basic; it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. After struggling with pointed needles and hardly visible eye of the needle to thread, for about ten minutes, we successfully completed the structure of our hat. The cat hat’s ears were then stitched to the base. So as to keep the cloth tightly stitched, and to keep the tread from unraveling, we went over our stitches again. We inverted our hat inside out, made the edges neat, and clipped out the extra thread, added on some designs and voila! The hats were complete, and I must say, for beginners, our hats looked pretty decent!

The maximum credit should go to our teacher- Miss Dianne for sitting patiently through our pathetic stitching skills and enumerable mistakes and making the class as lively as possible. It was a class to remember for life. To sum it all up, we had a group photo of the whole stitching team taken, with all of us wearing the hats that we made. It was a whole new experience for us, and as I aspire to take up fashion as my career in life and certainly this hat making session can be considered as an inspiring introduction to it. I might have imagined myself in a physics or history class, but I never imagined that I would sit down and make hats at school. It was a class that I will never forget and I hope that our school gives us more opportunities of this kind.

By R.Ranjini