I didn't want to have just a plain black mortarboard for my commencement, so I modified mine. We weren't allowed to keep our hats, so I had to design my modifications so that they were removable. I like pentagons better than squares, so I decided to make my hat a pentagon, and made a pentagon frame that fit around the square of the mortarboard. I also like lime green (if you can't tell by the pictures of my dorm room), so I used some fabric I had from an old umbrella to make a cover for the cardboard frame. Finally, I put some LEDS into the corners. I did it all the night before commencement, in about six hours, and did all of the sewing by hand. The people around me used my hat as a landmark to explain their location to their parents (I was pretty hard to miss).