Toque

		This was a development of the idea I had in 'From hatband to hat'. However, instead of leaving the fabric soft & floppy, I decided to put stiffening inside, and for this I used an extra-heavy duty interfacing. The construction is extremely simple: just cut a strip of whatever stiffening you're using, wrap it round your forehead to get the size, and then stick or staple the ends together as though you were making a paper crown. The covering of this is a soft two-tone organza - it frays like nobody's business, so you have to make sure any raw edges are kept well tucked under. Because it's semi-transparent, I painted the stiffening red before I started.
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ThenI just wrapped the organza round (a longer piece than I actually needed), folding it into pleats as I went. That was probably the trickiest part, because organza not only frays, it slithers, so what I did in the end was pin the pleats at both ends and then lightly press them into place with a cool iron.
Then I tacked the ends of the organza into place and used the tiniest and discreetest stitches I could manage just to stop it coming adrift along the top & bottom edges. The dangling left-over piece I just bunched up, taking care to keep raw edges well inside, and tacked it down when I had an arrangement I liked, to cover the join in the pleated part.
The top (it doesn't clash in real life as badly as it does in the photo!) I made in a similar way to the one in 'From hatband to hat', except that I also used a shape cut out of the stiffening. I just drew round the inside of the 'crown' shape, and cut out an oval slightly bigger.
Then I just snipped a fringe round the edge and bent it downwards, covered the whole thing with satin and then put a plastic ring round the edge to hold it all in place and stapled it. Then all I had to do was stick the top in place with fabric glue, neaten off the edges inside with petersham and there it was.
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