wig making

I've been meaning to make Auralion a new wig for a while now but have been very intimidated by the prospect since he has a rather specific hairstyle.

I read a lot of tutorials and watched a lot of videos and finally decided on a method I thought would work well. Then I proceeded to get sidetracked and after buying the materials I put the project on the back burner and ignored it for a solid two weeks.

Well then I started work on my mod project for Aura's twin brother, Cailath, and while I didn't think the head turned out similar enough to be successful in that regard, I did grow rather attached and wanted to make a proper wig for the as-yet-nameless head.

So I went out and bought a children's wig from the party store so that I could deconstruct it and sort of play around with wig making.

After watching a few more tutorials I decided that for the sake of practicing (since I don't know what style I want to go for yet for him) it would be easiest if I didn't have to sew, so strapped a plastic bag over his head and hot glued down some lace in the shape I wanted for a wig cap. I then cut away the plastic bag and started to hot glue down wefts of hair. The entire process was extremely quick and easy and looked surprisingly decent (in my opinion) considering the materials used.

Anyway, after this was done I decided I really wanted to make more wigs just for fun so I looked at yet more tutorials and decided I wanted to attempt to fix Aura's wig after all. But I initially decided I would be lazy and just try to make a clip on ponytail for his wig.

So I gave that a try and was less than pleased with the results. If I did it again I think I could do it better but I didn't have the right color to work with anyway and I had used all the longest wefts from the wig I bought to make the attempted ponytail and it seemed like more trouble than it was worth to try to detach them.

I still wanted to fix Aura's wig, however, so I decided to try my original plan. This was to use yarn to make the wefts myself and then brush out and straighten the yarn before attaching it to the wig cap. Since I had also planned for this to just be a prototype, I went with the same plastic bag, hot glue, and lace method. Then I brushed out tons and tons of yarn wefts and used a flat iron on the lowest setting to straighten them.

The yarn that I thought matched Aura's original wig well ended up almost white so I attempted to mix in a brighter yellow I had. The result made it look more like he has streaked hair and I almost scrapped the project after gluing down the first strands, but I decided it would be good practice to see if I could finish and get the style right. Since I was working with really thick yarn, his hair ended up thick enough to make the ponytail without any fancy additions, clip ons, or two part wigs.

I was going to just leave it be after finishing the ponytail but I ended up cutting and styling it and I think I might actually keep it as his official wig.  It ended up looking much better than I'd expected. It's kind of a lot to adjust to because he's looked so prim and proper with his neatly parted long straight hair for ages and now he has all these layers and spikes. It's much more accurate for his character but it's a big change after all these months of dealing with the temp wig.

I couldn't decide on one picture because I wanted to show various angles of it. There are a few things I'd change if I did it again but for now I'm fairly pleased!