Flame Princess Wig Part II

Whooooo, boy. This is going to be an image-heavy post -- sorry, folks!

I'mma just drop the cut right here. In case you don't want to see the wig business in excruciating detail.


So! I left you in the last post with the styrofoam core and wire cage finished, and not much else. Well, today comes the fun part.

I started by hot gluing the cone to the top of the wig. A big glop of glue in the inside of the hollow, followed by a generous caulking around the outside. It needs to be super stable, after all -- this baby is going to be heavy!

Mmmmm, hot caulk. (yes, I am 13.)

In terms of positioning, I set the front of the cone right about at the center of the wig. So the whole huge swoop will be towards the back of the head, but not hanging off backwards, yanno?

Next, I sectioned off the short bits in front, since that's a key part of Flame Princess's aesthetic and the wig was kind enough to provide them for me with no extra effort. 

And we're ready to roll! I started by covering the bottom inch or so of the cone with Elmer's, taking small chunks of hair from right around the base, and wrapping them tightly around it. The hair is long, so it didn't take much before it felt pretty solid. 

At this point, "method" kind of went out the window. I wanted to balance getting plenty up at the top (where only the longest pieces would reach) and wanting a really thick base of hair to a) cover the cone completely and b) make it 100% secure. So I wrapped. I ended up going mostly clockwise from the left side of the head and counterclockwise from the right, to minimize the awkward bunching the hair did when forced to go a direction it wasn't intended to go. 

At this point, you'll notice that not all the gold is covered, but also that there's a crapton of hair left to wrap around. Eeeexcellent. The next step was to add the wire cage that was going to serve as the anchor for all my froofery. 

I threaded an iridescent ribbon through the base of the wire cage, thinking it would make things easier. Hint: it didn't. 

Ribbon removed.

When I continued wrapping the hair around the wire and the already-wrapped hair, I soon found that hot glue was pretty much the only option. Which sucks, in some ways, because it is a freaking mess when, for example, you burn your finger pressing a curl to the glue, then involuntarily jerk back, and in jerking back completely destroy the shape of the curl. Not that that ever happened. More than once. 

I'm not going to tell you how many times I burned myself today.

When I got towards the end of the hair available for wrapping and curling and whatnot, I decided that the back looked silly, so I used the last couple pieces to make a bunch of curls there.

Here they are, hot-glued and pinned.

Next up: hair spray. You knew it was coming, didn't you? The research I did told me that Göt2B Glued freeze spray was the best thing out there for hard hold wig sculpting, so that's what I used. 

Yeeeeeeah, best to do that outside.

So! After the glue had set and dried and the hairspray had shellacked my wig to a helmet, it was time for the frippery. 

I had so many things! I had gold pipe cleaners twisted into coils! I had gold mesh ribbon with damask patterns in glitter! Iridescent ribbons! paper flowers! 

Gold ... branchy things! From the floral department!

Yeah, well. The best-laid plans, right? The more I fiddled with it, the better I liked it with just the hair swirls and the gold branchy things.

In FACT, after painstakingly covering a couple of the wire flamey things with the iridescent gold ribbon, I decided that actually it looked better without them there at all. So I had at them with the wire cutters.

I stand by the decision to make the wire cage, though; it gave some body to the hair, where I think it would have looked kind of awkward as a tight cone shape that followed the styrofoam perfectly.

Final product:

I'll get some photos of me wearing it sometime; it looks fantastic. The only thing remaining is spraying the bangs to flip out a little (and keep out of my face). 

The next edition will be about the dress-making! We'll see how that all goes; I'm kinda nervous about it, not being much of a seamstress. Still: tally ho!

Edited: The very last changes to the wig (namely, the keeping my hair out of my eyes) is now detailed in this post.