Several months ago, my brother said to me in his usual way: "make me a toque."

I looked at him, puzzled.  I'd never heard of a toque before.  Little I knew that "ear flap hat like they wore in Fargo" was technically called a toque.

Unfortunately his request was received when I was just starting to knit for some baby shower gifts and ultimately I decided to knit him his hat as part of his Christmas present.

I asked him what type of toque he wanted and he sent me this picture.... the Tough Guy's Toque

WTF.

Several google searches of toque hats did not produce one quite the shape of this hat.  The flappies are wider and the crown seems to be shorter than most of the toques I could find.  I'm sure that there is one that I could have made do with, but when I'm trying to replicate something I tend to get really anal retentive about it.    So I decided to make up my own pattern.  I essentially did the knitting version of playing a song by ear.  I kept a photo of the toque in front of me and started knitting.  I did some initial measurements to figure out what I would need to cast on in order for it to fit his head and figured out the size of the flappies based on the overall size of the hat.  I printed out the picture and took some measurements to get a general idea of the proportions for the stripes.

Finished hat on my brother

Here's how I did it:

I used Caron Simply Soft in Red and Mango, less than 1 skein of each (though not much less :p) and US 8 circular needles. 

On 8s the gauge of this yarn is 18 sts = 4 inches.  My brother has an unusually round melon, and I asked him to measure his head so I could make sure it had the right fit.  Good thing too, the average hat pattern is based on an average adult head circumference of 19 inches, and his is 24 inches.  So did a little math and ended up with needing to cast on 108 sts for the brim of the hat.

When I looked at the original picture, it appeared that the flaps were a each at least 1/4 of the overall circumference of the hat.  So I divided 108sts by 4 to figure out the starting point for my flappies (27 sts each).  Since I wanted them to flare a little bit I cast on more than 27 (but I honestly don't remember how many more) then after a few rows I decreased so that I was at 27 sts.  I started out with about 4 rows of the Mango, then joined in the Red.  I opted to work with two balls of Mango, one on either end, rather than running the Mango along the backside of the flaps.  I started out doing it that way, but because the Simply Soft is so soft, I found that it pulled too easily with the additional yarn woven behind, thus distorting the shape of the flap.  I kept a border of 4 sts of Mango on either end, while working the Red in stockinette until the flaps measured about 4 inches (once again, I don't remember exactly how much, but it's around 4).

I moved the first flap to a stitch holder while I worked the second one, then with both ready, I started the brim by casting on 27 with mango, knitting across the 27 sts of the first flap (keeping with the mango border/red main section pattern), casting on another 27 sts in mango, and knitting across the 27 sts of the second flap, just as I did the first.  I then switched over to red and continued to knit in the round until the red section measured about 2 inches.  I changed to mango, knit 4 inches, then switched to red for an inch, back to mango for an inch, and then back to red for the last 2 inches, over which I shaped the crown of the hat.

Then made and attached an orange pom to the top and wove in the ends.  And voila!  Tough guy touqe replica!