What's with the Wigs? Part 2: Hair

So, you got that wig cap made up? Great! It's all dry and it fits like perfection to your dolls' head? Awesome! Have ya added hair yet? No? That's alright, here's how I add hair. The synthetic stuff at least.

There's a few types of hair for dolls that are quite acceptable, and I'll go into that in a new post next week, but in the meantime, we'll use synthetic hair. This stuff is plastic, it's obviously not realistically sized hair, but the better stuff is straight, without crimping or oddly wavy strands, and the best stuff? Is wefted.

Wefts of hair, both synthetic and real, can be made like this for easy sewing.

I always start at the base of the wig cap, it makes it easier to figure out where the bangs are going to be. Thread around a foot of good quality thread matching the hair color as closely as possible onto a needle. Do not use flimsy beading needles, they'll bend and break, just use a regular sewing needle. Starting on one end of the hair, begin sewing at the back of the wig cap.

Try to keep the weft ends from ending at the front of the wig, since you need to knot the thread when it gets to the end of the weft and that can leave a bump you don't want at the front.

Once the initial line is done, you can begin the next line! The wig at the back can be a bit sparse, so you can save a bit of hair for the front of the doll, though don't leave too much space open at the back, or you'll see the cap color through the hair.

Keep the wefts at the front of the wig as close to each other as possible to make sure the hairs cover the cap, it's better to have a slightly thick bangs rather than a thin one that shows off the wig cap or stitching.

Next up, you just keep adding to the wig! Work slowly, you don't have to be in a rush to make the wig for your doll, and rushing leads to finger-stabs with the sewing needle so...prevent the pain, okay?

Once you reach nearly to the top, you're going to have a bit of a circle at the top that you'll really want to cover up.

This is pretty easy to deal with, just take about 20-40 cm of hair weft and roll it up REALLY TIGHT, sewing the roll area with the needle and thread to keep it tight as possible, the tighter it is, the less you'll see the wefting with what happens next.

This one wasn't as tightly sewn as I could have made it, you'll see what happens next.

From there, fit it as tightly as possible into the circle at the top of the wig cap, it should fit very tightly. If it fits, great! If it's too small, then add more weft to it, or to the cap. If the circle is too big....you might want to take some weft off of it until you can squish it into the space.

It will look ridiculous at first, like one of those odd little Troll dolls with a bizarre hairdo.

From here you can do one of two things:

You can glue it into place using the same waterproof glue or you can sew it into place (ouch on the fingers but it STAYS PUT).

I chose to do a bit of both. I put some glue on the coiled wig end, then set up the wig with some stitches to keep it in place while the glue dried.

Once it was in place (and the glue had dried), I flip the wig right-side up and started to sort the hair spiral. Basically....Find the center of the spiral on top of the wig and squish the hair out as evenly as possible to cover any gaps you find in the wig itself, make sure it covers everything as much as possible and keeps the hair looking neat. I secured it with a hair clip.

You can see that this wig is a little sparse, I didn't -quite- have enough white wig wefts to make it full, but I plan to get some alpaca hair to make a better wig for Amara in the future.

After this, if the hair is appropriate (not cheap-as-heck plastic) you can boil some water and pour it over the wig to help shape how the hair falls. Once the hair is dried you can trim and style the hair however you want!

Congratulations! You've made your own wig! Using my admittedly amateur instructions...let me know how it turns out if you use the same method, or what you use that was different!