The Hat With No Occasion

The hat is drying on a wooden head. I have been asked not to interfere with it overnight, which seems an unnecessarily personal way of putting a perfectly sound instruction.

It is green. That was intentional. Almost everything else happened during manufacture.

I found the workshop above a hardware shop, with rain running down the stairwell window and a handwritten notice offering a day of feltmaking. There was one place left. I paid, hung up my jacket and sat between a retired bus driver called Dennis and a woman who had brought her own lunch in a biscuit tin.

“Hat, bowl or bag?” asked Arun, who was teaching us.

I said hat before considering the consequences. Dennis had chosen a bowl. He seemed a man who understood the advantages of an object without a prescribed occupant.

Arun measured my head. Then he drew a much larger outline on a sheet of flexible plastic.

“That's generous,” I said.

“It shrinks.”

“How much?”

He showed me the test piece he had made with this batch of wool, and the measurements before and after. I liked him immediately. There were pencil marks, crossed-out figures and a small tea stain on the paper. We adjusted the pattern from those results rather than trusting a universal rule about sheep.

The wool came in long, soft lengths which pulled apart into almost weightless wisps. I chose a mossy green and a little dark blue. Dennis chose orange without hesitation.

“For the keys,” he said.

“So you can find them?”

“So my wife can find where I've put the bowl.”

We laid thin overlapping layers around our plastic shapes. Mine resembled a very large, very flat bell. The plastic would keep the two sides from felting together while the wool joined around its edges. Later we would cut an opening and take it out.

There was something deeply satisfying about arranging the fibres. I kept trying to perfect one patch while neglecting the next. Arun held my work towards the window; the thin places admitted more light. I filled them before we went any further.

Then came warm soapy water, netting over the loose wool, and the gentlest rubbing I could manage.

For a while it seemed we had paid to wash something which did not yet exist.

Dennis asked whether the soap was glue.

“No,” Arun said. “Watch what happens when you rinse it.”

I had a pencil in my dry pocket and drew a greatly enlarged wool fibre on the corner of my pattern notes: overlapping surface scales, all pointing along its length. Beside it I drew another facing the other way.

“The fibres don't slide equally easily in both directions,” I said. “Keep moving them against one another while they're wet, and they work into a tangle that holds.”

Dennis regarded the drawing.

“My jumper.”

“Possibly.”

“Orange. Used to fit.”

He looked down at his bowl with renewed interest.

When the surface held together, the work became firmer: rubbing, rolling, opening the bundle, turning it, rolling again. The rain kept tapping the window. Somewhere below us somebody was trying several doorbells before buying one. Each had a different opinion of the afternoon.

I lost count of the rolls. Nothing exploded. I checked the fabric and carried on.

The woman with the biscuit tin was called Sal. She had made three hats already and was attempting a fourth for a wedding. Her first marriage, she told us; his second; both of them old enough to know they disliked chair covers.

“What colour are yours?” Dennis asked.

“There aren't going to be any.”

This interested him more than the wedding. His daughter was getting married. Apparently chairs had become a substantial area of negotiation.

I listened while working a stubborn fold out of the edge. They discussed weather, cousins and a man who would certainly bring his own mustard. Nobody needed me to solve any of it. I discovered that I was enjoying myself enormously.

By late afternoon my hat had become dense enough to withstand being handled as one piece. The soap rinsed away; the fabric remained. Dennis lifted his orange bowl from the basin and announced that his jumper had been a rehearsal.

Arun helped me settle the wet hat over a wooden block. I wanted a modest brim, something to keep rain out of my eyes. One side came down smoothly. The other insisted on a wave.

I worked on the wave. It moved round the hat.

I worked on it again. Now there were two.

“May I?” Sal asked.

She folded one side up and pressed a shallow crease into the crown. The whole thing changed. It looked purposeful, slightly rakish, and wholly unsuitable for a man hoping to pass unnoticed through a hardware shop.

I laughed at my reflection in the darkening window.

“You don't have to keep it that way,” she said.

I turned the block a little. The blue fibres had spread through the green in a broken stripe. I had wanted a straight band, but this was rather pleasing. I tucked the edge under once more and asked Arun how to keep that shape while it dried.

We left it on the block. I could collect it tomorrow. There was no need to persuade the room to dry faster on my account.

Before leaving, we washed the mats and carried the basins downstairs. Dennis had already decided his bowl was too good for keys. Sal showed us a photograph of her intended husband: a broad, delighted man beside an aggressively pruned hedge.

“He does that every spring,” she said. “I've asked him to leave the roses to me.”

Outside, the rain had stopped. I put on my jacket and went to find supper, pleasantly tired through the shoulders.

There is a green fibre caught in the fold of this notebook. I shall leave it there until the ink dries.

Tomorrow I must collect the hat. I have absolutely nowhere to wear it.