I’m a milliner, a hat designer, and we make hats here as they have been made for hundreds of years. We’re in my studio, which is in my garden. It’s mostly a working studio, but obviously clients come for fittings, to order their bespoke hats. It actually has a title as an endangered craft. Everything is made by hand, we don’t buy any shapes in, everything’s hand-stitched, hand-blocked.

The UK is really well known for its couture hat making, made from scratch, made by hand. A lot of hat makers are based in London, so it’s quite rare to have a hat maker sending hats to prestige events who’s based pretty much in the middle of nowhere, in a little Yorkshire village called Addingham. I make hats for royals, they’re the big hat wearers. Royal Ascot’s a big thing for me. I have hundreds of hats that go down south, all made here and shipped all over the world.

My work is very specific, I’m making hats for events. Mostly ladies hats, for things like weddings, investitures, christenings, Christmas parties. I’m very much about women, older women generally, coming to me who are quite nervous about what they’re going to wear and how they’re going to look. It’s my job to make them look amazing, make them stand out but in a good way, trying to keep them modern and relevant.

I’m a mum, I have two adopted children, and I also work for the NHS. I’m a psychologist. I work with people with severe mental health problems who are often in a crisis, and I work as part of an inpatient team, helping those people to stabilise quickly, and hopefully pointing them in the right direction for getting better. One of the strategies that we try and help people to learn on the ward is about mindfulness, being able to let go. Let go of negative thoughts and feelings and just focus in the present, and on doing something creative as well.

So for me, this is good for mental health, it is good for emotional well-being, and it is good to be creative. if you are lost in something, particularly something that you’re enjoying, then you’re not thinking about all the negative things in life, past or present or future. So it’s a good coping strategy.

Making hats, making headbands, things like that is for me a form of mindfulness. I love the sewing. When I first started six years ago, I really couldn’t thread a needle. I’ve always been interested in visual creativity. But for me personally, I find that it’s a way of being away from being a busy mum, as well as busy at work. It’s my time.

I don’t make these hats or these headbands for any particular function. So they’re not for going to the races or for weddings or anything like that. It’s my personal hobby. It’s the actual act of making it.

I work for a group of colleges looking after all their marketing, and I am responsible for doing all their events, etc. I have to arrange all the technical side, all the presentations, all the signs that are done and the graphic design, etc. for it. So I’m very creative, that is part of my job. I don’t think I could work within a job that didn’t have a creative element to it, because I’ve got to have a voice, I’ve got to have an outlet, and that’s essentially what I am.

There’s lots of things that are creative that people don’t really think of. Even our careers advisors, who I look after, they have to be creative in understanding how different people communicate, and how you can explain to somebody about a career. You’ve always got to be creative in everything you do.

When you sit in this room here, a designer or a creative person has been involved in absolutely everything: be it the design of the chair we’re sitting on, the tablecloth, the making of the fabric or the felt we’re using. If it wasn’t for creative people, we wouldn’t have houses to live in, and we wouldn’t have beds to sleep in. So we’re surrounded by creativity. Absolutely!

And being in a college, it’s funny, when you’re advising parents about their child who wants to go into a creative industry, they are worried that they’re not going to be able to earn any money, or be able to have a future. And when you actually explain to them that everything they’re wearing, and their shoes, and their car they’re driving in, has been touched by a creative person, they then start to realise that they’re really, really important industries.