Ballgown part one: I finished my wig!
So, as some of you may have heard, this summer I'm embarking on an epic sewing project in which I'm going to be making, with the help of my lovely Grandmom, a robe à la française because they are awesome. I haven't gotten a decent start yet, unfortunately, though I do have the patterns from J. P. Ryan all ready to go. While I wait for my Grandmom to clear some space in her inexplicably-busier-than-mine schedule, I decided to go ahead and accomplish anything I could on my own. And no 18th century lady would be caught in public with her hair down! Wigs were popular for men, of course, but women usually had little hairpieces pinned in to help their own hair reach those magnificent heights of which you have no doubt heard. The powder (white, grey, and blue were popular) was then basically a great tool to make sure the different types of hair seemed to blend together. Clever, right?
Well, I decided to go all out and not just buy one of those awful plastic-looking wigs they sell online in the "Marie Antoinette style," but to actually buy a wig that was similar to my own hair (but much longer, of course) and style it myself. I agree, I DO have too much free time.
Here are the before and after pictures:
That's not me, by the way. Wig modelled by Molly's and my adopted child Edwob. He's genuinely useful sometimes.
Oh, and I took pictures every step of the way, so if you're interested in making your own geeky 18th century wig, you're in luck!
Materials:
a wig. No, really!
lots and lots of hairspray
cotton batting
a hairnet or something like it
many, many bobby pins
a curling iron
a comb
white, grey, or light blue hair colour spray (I used white and it came out kind of grey, for the record)
any assorted junk you want to stick in for decoration
Okay, so the first step is to get a blob of cotton batting and stick it into the hairnet, making a "rat." Secure this to the crown of the wig, not right on top of the head but a little bit further back. Think Amy Winehouse.
Then use the comb to tease one chunk of hair at a time right around the base of the rat, draping these pieces up and over just to make sure they'll do an okay job of covering the batting.
I actually had to go in and remove bits of the batting more than once.
Also, don't worry too much about slivers of white showing. Though it's better to try to cover them up, the colour spray will do a pretty good job of evening it all out (as was its original intention!) Don't forget to liberally coat the whole updo with hairspray every time you add a new piece to it. It needs LOTS of hairspray.
At this point I wasn't securing the hair at the top. I later decided, once I'd finished with the first row of updo-age, to use a normal hair tie thing at the top, just to keep the hair up while I worked. It ended up being a good idea.
Oh, and don't be bothered by gaping holes in the wig like this:
As long as you're putting most or all of the hair up, that shouldn't show once you're finished.
If you want one of those long tubular curls down the back as I absolutely did (or two, even! It's all up to what you're shooting for) start leave down a little bit of hair from each layer in the back. If you leave a long horizontal chunk down instead of a long vertical chunk, you'll end up with a gaping hole above the curl.
I also left two pieces down at the front in order to do my side curls. I'm not sure how much I like the final effect: if you want the side curls and don't want that weird ram look at the front that mine has, put all your hair up and do your side curls the way I do my second set.
I then took my operation into the room with the curling iron and failed to bring along the camera. Here's what happened.
Okay, so fake hair doesn't melt or anything under heat (as far as I know from experience, that is!) but it does seem to have trouble holding the curl. It takes a lot of work to get the look you want. I basically curled that long piece into one long tube curl as I previously said I wanted to. I then bobby pinned individual sections of the hair that's up at the top and curled the remaining part that was hanging down the back. I did that over and over until there was a lovely little mess of curl hanging down the back of the giant puff.
Then I did my side curls. They were a bit of a pain. The first set were alright; I curled them up and used lots of bobby pins and hairspray to keep them in place, one on each side. Not too terrible.
The second set, on the other hand, pushed me toward lunacy. I clipped one of those locks hanging down the back and did what I could to curl it into a little tube and secure it on both with bobby pins. But it was HARD. It can be done, don't worry, but it is HARD. I then used one pin on each side of the tube to secure it above the other curl and then one on each side again to fasten it to the curl below it. Basically, it took at least five bobby pins to do each curl. With more patience I'd have put many more curls all up the sides, but after I got the pair done I was angry and ready to get on with it.
Here's what I had at this point. There's a bit of white there because I tried to use spray glue to secure it, but I'm not sure it did any good, especially after all that hairspray.
Then I broke out the white spray colour and coated the whole thing rather liberally. The reason I love using this instead of powder is, of course, it's not very messy, and using spray over a brown wig instead of using a grey or white wig in the first place is great because it really does look like it's been powdered and, does the powder's original job by evening out things like cotton batting showing through the wig. It's exciting.
The spray will get everywhere, but it's washable. I got it off Monsieur le Tête's face with a bit of soap and water. Now I see why people in the 18th century used those paper cones to cover their faces while they were being powdered:
Poor guy.
Anyway, on a late night trip to WalMart to pick up some more bobby pins (you need A LOT) I saw a bunch of random decorative stuff and had to buy them to throw into my final product:
And there you have it!