A Modified Coif (hat)

A post about actually making things!!

My inspiration for making this hat came from this one, although whence it came I am no longer sure.
And the reason for looking at this hat in the first place was due to the custom of oczepiny in Polish weddings where the bride swaps here wreath of flowers or whatever for the hat. Unfortunately no one seems to provide pictures of such a hat. (I don't think we'll be doing it anyway actually.)

I made up a simple pattern consisting of a rectangle with two curved corners, and a curved piece somewhat like the shape of a back of a head. I measured my head a bit first to work out the approximate sizes.
Then I made it up a couple of times in old sheet material, changing the curve a little bit and so on to try and get a good fitting hat. Unfortunately, this was really hard. This was the original shape of the back piece.
I'm not sure if changing the curve really made much difference to the problems I had, but it meant the length of the curve was different so I needed to make the piece shorter to still match up with the rectangular length.
It continued to pucker around the edge of the back and I don't really know what to do about it. I tried to get rid of it and maybe it reduced it a little?
A few days after I had a good idea about how to change the shape of the pieces so it might work better, but now I have forgotten.
It looks somewhat better in this material than the sheet, and I thought maybe if it was in velvet or something thick it would hold it's shape by itself rather than puckering.

I made it up in this material because I had some lying around left over, I had tonnes of lace that would go (by also being black) so I could decorate it, and if it was slightly gothic I thought it would be easier to wear as that is a more acceptable type of weirdness than the type of weirdness that simply makes one wear a weird hat. Goth clothing is so useful that way.

Here's all my pics of me wearing it before going out that morning....
If anyone knows how to make a better hat let me know. I looked for instructions and other examples, but could only find different styles of coifs worn in Elizabethan times and so on, but none like this, although I intend to make some of the other styles, as there is a shortage of hats and no one seems to wear them and they are so useful and another accessory - and one that you can make out of only small bits of stuff you might have around. How useful.
I might also make this one go further down at the back and sides, although I made it this length because it seemed to sort of match the historical examples of other similarly shaped hats I found.