the cherry hat

You know when you make a pompom and you haven't got the stamina to wind enough wool onto it and it ends up a bit disappointingly sparse? Well the pompom on The Cherry Hat had the opposite problem. It was too dense. It was too heavy. It was so full of wool that it wanted to fall right off that cherry little hat. The pompom was what gave the cherry hat its name. It was very big and very round and very red and very fat.

The name cherry hat was given by the little boy who wore it. It was made my his mummy to the replace the original cherry hat that his grandma had made, and had fallen off in a carpark in Manchester. It was made by his mummy to go with the jumper with a red zip which she had designed to keep him warm at a cheaper price than the one in the Boden catalogue. But that little boy didn't like the new cherry hat. It was too big and the cherry was to big. So it got put away or the summer, along with the jumper with the red zip. The next winter, when it snowed, the little boy's mummy got out the cherry hat and decided it was time to sort it out. So instead of making a new cherry hat she made it smaller, by sewing a little seam inside it. And, as for the cherry, she pulled out loads of strands of wool, which made it a bit unstable, so she had to find the bit that held it together and pull that up really tight, and knot it. And then she trimmed it until it was nice and fluffy and sewed it on extra tightly, so that it didn't want to fall right off the cherry hat any more.

And did that little boy want to wear that brand new fixed cherry hat when he went out in the first snow of winter? No, he just put his hood up.

And did his little brother want to wear it? Will he wear a hat at all?