Women's World A HEADBAND FIT FOR A QUEEN by Beatrice Ashton One of the Coronation gifts the Maori people sent Her Majesty the Queen was a tipare or taniko headband. It was not difficult to find out whose skilled fingers made the headband for the Queen, but quite impossible to persuade the maker to enjoy any publicity. ‘Just say that I'am a member of the Wellington Maori Women's Welfare League … there are so many women who taniko as well as I do, and some of them much better …’ I asked her how she had become so expert. ‘Taniko is not so difficult!’ she said. ‘Once you have the patience to master the first steps, the rest is easy. About the time I left school in Rotorua I watched my aunt making a taniko belt. When I asked her to teach me how to make one for myself I certainly didn't realise that I was giving up one whole day of my young life! My aunt wouldn't let me stop until I had managed the first steps, and by the end of the first day I was in tears.’ It is her opinion that anyone should be able to learn the fundamentals of taniko in one day with or without tears, but that the hard thing is to master the weaving of the main fabric—the body work. Taniko is an art that has always been handed on from one expert to another, but now that Mr Mead's book Taniko Weaving is available I asked what she thought of it as a guide. ‘I think it is very good and easy to follow once a person has had one lesson. There is a knack to taniko that you can really learn only from watching someone working.’ Indeed, she told me that the old taniko experts jealously covered their work from the curious eyes of their friends who could take in a new pattern at a glance. Some even went so far as to camouflage the true pattern by combining another design with it, so that only a close examination would reveal the secret. Like their great-great-grandmothers, modern