"Grass Roots" Dream, Thin Hand Knitting

In Changhe Town, straw hat is the life of many people.

When Feng Xiaoju, 76, did not make straw hats, he still wore a black cloth apron around his waist. This was a protective tool for straw hats.

Every morning, she gets up early at five or six and starts knitting.

The cap is elliptical, with a large diameter of about seventeen eight cm, and a small straight warp about eleven two cm. The hat has a height of 13 to 4 centimeters.

The brim and the brim are embedded with a string of eight strands of cotton silk, which controls the size of the buckles, and the brim is also more than 10 centimeters wide and maintains a horizontal state.

On the outer edge of the straw hat, a small bamboo ball with a thickness of about three or four millimetres was embedded to prevent the brim from falling down.

After everything is complete, just cut off the excess weeds.

After a lot of people do a good job of hats, they have to grind them for five or six minutes, otherwise the straw hat will not be beautiful.

Feng Xiaoju's straw hat never used this procedure.

She said: "this is not fifty or sixty years of skills can not be done in order to make the effort uniform, smooth surface."

Spring comes to summer, and autumn comes to the winter solstice. Feng Xiaoju keeps knitting all the year round. She still refuses to stop from a little girl who is still young and seventy or eighty years old.

"Accustomed to doing things for life, instead of being bored, they are all thumbs."

Straw hat may not only be the habit of Feng Xiaoju, but also the dream, confidence and achievement of this group of ordinary rural women.

"I was the pillar of the family, and the men didn't earn enough money to grow their fields."

Speaking of this, Feng Xiaoju's face glittering and glowing.

She said, when she was 25 years old, she made a top.

At that time, the maximum daily wage of ordinary workers was one yuan and two cents. The women in the village could make three straw hats per day, and the price of straw hat was four cents per roof.

Feng Xiaoju only made two straw hats a day, but because of his outstanding skills, the price of each straw hat was three times that of the ordinary price.

There were about two hundred or three hundred young men in the village, and the straw hat on their heads came out of her hand.

The most memorable memory that Feng Xiaoju felt on his face remained in a primary school site after the Luqiao chapter of heaven Zhang. Now part of it has become a long river adult school.

Several villagers in Changhe Town have withheld six per cent of each straw hat purchase (after being replaced by one point), and started to learn fees and charges. "International relocation, women's work is a branch". One top, two top and numerous top straw hats "cover" played the "straw hat industry primary school". Students from Yuyao and Shangyu came here to study.

Yes, straw hat comes from grass roots, and has extraordinary power. This is its language.

It tells the people around us, telling the next generation, telling the world.

Just as you want to read Africa, from the old temple in North Africa and copper in the Sahara desert, the most common folk works often contain the most sentiments of life and nature.

If you read this language, you will really know it.