Straw rain hat

The birdfolk have a characteristic straw rain hat, made from a flat circle of straw folded in distinctive ways reminiscent of a beak and a feathered crest, and decorated with a woven spell which increases its rain-resistance properties. It's customary to replace this hat with a new one each year at the Bringing-Back-the-Rains Festival, and the annual cycle of production of the hat exemplarizes a cultural custom of group work.

## Everybody Makes Some Hats

### Straw

#### Gathering

Throughout the dry season, people who are out foraging in areas where the correct type of narrow cane is found will gather armloads of it into their flat-bottomed boats along with whatever else they find. Identifying and cutting this cane is a safe task to give to someone who has no idea what they're doing, as long as they can be trusted to handle a knife. Back in the village, another safe-for-the-ignorant task is tying the cut cane into bundles to hang up for drying: the bundles will be smoked over the coal-pots in the kitchens of the town.

#### Preparation

As the wet season grows nearer, all hands occasionally join in taking apart the smoked cane bundles and sorting the canes by length. Since every hearth in the village had some canes drying over it, every house in the village has some bundles to sort, and this work will be getting done by anyone you may visit, so you'll be helping all of them and they'll be coming over to help you in turn. Those who are more skilled in the task of hat-making will only be doing bundles for a little while, until enough canes are sorted for it to be worth embarking upon the next step:

### Hat Base

#### Radial framework

The right number of each length of cane is placed in a radial pattern, working on a quarter-circle at a time, and then a minimal number of canes are woven across at five points to hold the general shape. If enough skilled workers are available, one person will make a quarter-circle and pass it off to another who will then assemble four of them into a round for further weaving; one person working along will make four quarters and then make a round, setting this round aside until this entire step is finished.

#### Fill weaving

Anyone with basic weaving skills and sufficient fine motor control can accomplish this, so it's a waste for a single skilled worker to do it alone - this is one of the good keeps-your-hands-busy social tasks which requires little mental input, and kids are often put to work on this as soon as their fingers can handle it. Additional dried canes are woven in to fill the gaps in the circle until it's relatively solid but still flexible; the lengths of the canes are immaterial as the ends can be trimmed off as needed.

### Finishing

#### Folding

The actual art of folding the hat the correct way is a muscle-memory thing; those who are otherwise skilled in hatmaking are permitted to try it, but any that are too lopsided will be disassembled back into reeds. (They joke about selling those to the elves, but they wouldn't, because making these things is quite actually sacred and to do it half-assed or to permit half-assed work to remain would be a direct dishonor to Keraji.)

Because this step is important and difficult it's often the domain of a specific person in a given household, whose assistants wait to take the folded hat and carefully secure the folds with X-shaped stitches at the points the folding person indicates.

#### Embroidery

An inch-wide border of brightly varicolored spider-silk threads goes around the edge of the "crest" portion of the hat. It's a relatively simple pattern depicting stylized high-topped storm clouds, executed in something like satin stitch. Below this line of clouds is a much narrower line of stitches, still relatively simple - in fact too simplified to be legible characters in Haidodoji's script, but that is what they are. This pattern is the magic woven into the reeds of the hat which make it waterproof even though the breezes pass through.

A standard bird-child of 12 who's taken an interest in embroidery can readily execute this; all the adults who embroider can do it, and all of them will be found doing so, picking up a folded-and-waiting hat from a stack in any room they visit and settling in to stitch until they rise. A hat will have six different colors of silk from six different stitchers if they only made brief visits. Folding the hat is harder than weaving this ordinary sort of magic into it.