18C wig - Lisa

I'm making a wig for my 18C court/masquerade dress.  I'm using the 18th Century Hair and Wig Styling book to style my wig otherwise I'd be hopeless.  I barely know how to dry my hair with a blow dryer.  The book offers clear, step by step instructions and a list of the needed supplies.  It's still not easy for me because I find setting hair in rollers nearly as hard as making a corset, but that's a personal problem.

I started with a cheap cosplay wig.  Mistake.  For very little extra, I could have got a much nicer wig. My wig is too small, is very thin along the sides, and has little inch long hairs sticking out of the wefts.  It might work if I was
planning to cosplay Sephiroth but not really for anything else.  Unfortunately I waited too long to figure this out and have had to make modifications because I don't have time to get an alternative.

Sephiroth

Too small - solution is to add elastic between the wefts.  The book suggests adding elastic at the sides.  I needed much, much more and cut all around the top of the wig and added between 3/4 and 1 1/2 inch all the way around.  Yes, this created a gap.  I added to areas where I knew I was going to have to add addition wefts of hair.

And then I just started pinning up hair.  And spraying.  Pin and spray (yes, there was also rinse, repeat).  I won't repeat the instructions and violate the author's intellectual property.  My biggest problem was that after sitting for a day or two, the pinned and sprayed hair suffered from entropy.

This meant unpinning, combing out and re-pinning in a tidier way.

wefts on table behind wig

I chose to wrap the curls and boil them, then coat them with glue because of entropy.  I only want to do this once.  I used 1 inch PVC pipe wrapped in foil, dipped the wrapped curls for about a minute, then coated them with white school glue.  Hair STILL worked loose.  I has skilz!

 More wrapping and pinning, spraying, undoing, wrapping, pinning.  Eventually I sewed some of the hair in place.














Here are final pictures of the wig, fabric ornament and both with and without a feather.

It's not possible to see how tall the wig is by looking at it on the wig stand.  It is at least 6 inches taller than the top of my head.  The men in the house are still giggling.  I have no pictures of it on my head because I just couldn't manage it.

The second biggest problem was the Sailor Scout cosplay sewing that was happening in the other room.  I'm coaching them through this project, but making them do all (OK, most) of the work.  To the right is my court gown.  Nearly finished.  This was supposed to be my 'Outside your Comfort Zone entry in the HSM, but I really think it's too costumey.  So I'm just not putting in an entry.

I'm off to Costume College tomorrow.  I plan to make Robin take pictures of me wearing dress and wig.  We will have fun, and be back next week (when I may or may not add a picture to this post).