Wig Adventures: Saber Nero
I want to preface this by saying that I personally don’t like working with wigs, nor do I think that I’m particularly good with them. Thus, this is titled “wig adventures” instead of “wig tutorial”. For this tutorial I used Arda’s Inigo in Platinum Blonde, a leftover Jeannie clip-on ponytail, and matching short wefts. The ponytail is optional as long as you have long enough wefts to make the braid around your bun.
One of the first things that I did for Nero’s wig was to sew extra wefts into the crown of the wig. There is a section just after the bangs end where it is very convenient to sew in an extra two layers or so. After you’ve done that, you can part the wefts in the middle and you will automatically get the small peaks you see in Nero’s hair. If you’d like to style it further, you can heat style it and apply some hair spray, or if you’d like to really exaggerate it, apply some transparent Elmer’s glue or caulk at the roots of the wefts.
Next, I turned it inside out and followed this tutorial to make the wig fit my head a bit better. Arda wigs on average run about 23″ around the head, but when you have a smaller head (like mine) and want a particularly tight wig, I would strongly recommend making the wig fit your head snugly.
Then did a test to see how the wig would look when it was in an updo. At this point I already added more wefts on the sides of the wig to cover up bald spots, but doing a test was helpful to see if I had enough. (See how messy it is tho? We’ll get to that in a moment.)
I made the decision to not bring up the rest of the hair, because I always, always have problems with my dark hair showing in the back of my wig. At first I wanted to try out one of Arda’s new 21″ sized Jeannie’s, but I got sick of waiting for them to come out and ordered an Inigo instead. Thus, the wig will remain a half updo, and the extra hair will be mostly covered by a gigantic bow anyhow.
The bun was made by purchasing one of the 6″ foam spheres at Joann’s fabrics and paper-maching it, then coating it with masking tape for a good base color and added stability.
Taking some longer cut strands, I made my own “wefts” by hot gluing the ends together. (Please use something besides your bare fingers to press the hot glue into the wefts) Then, I glued both of the ends down on top of the base.
Rince and repeat as necessary until the whole thing is covered. For the braid, I took apart an existing Jeannie’s ponytail wig and used ¼ of the wefts there. If you don’t have that, the package of short wefts should suffice (although depending on the size of your bun, you might need to use longer wefts by Arda.) Make sure to make it long enough so that you can stuff both ends of the braid onto the inside of the bun. After braiding it, tie off both ends and stub both of them with caulk. After the ends have dried, I loosely sewed it on to the bun using wefting thread. (It covered all of my hot glue mistakes on the sides of the bun too :D)
Now, back to the main part of the wig:
Next, I stubbed my wig by portion, following this tutorial. Doing it by sections typically turns out neater than trying to stub a gigantic ponytail. However, this method does have it’s drawbacks. At a certain point however, I realized I messed up and started the ponytail too high. So for the rest of the wig, I pulled the hair at the sides below the ponytail, stubbed it there and tied it to the netting of the wig. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but it worked well enough even though I ended up having to add some extra wefts.
Ta-da! Now it looks fairly reasonable with the bun sitting on top of it. The only thing left to do at this point was to trim the wig. Since I was the one who was going to be wearing it but I couldn’t trim the wig while it was on my head, I asked a friend to do it for me.
It’s still a little bit long in the back, and I might do some finishing up work on it, but for the most part I’m happy with how it turned out. :)
I made the ahoge by just grabbing a long tuft of loose hair fibers and running caulk along it until it was pretty solidly set. Then, I did the same thing to a slightly shorter tuft. Taking a wire, I put clear packaging tape around the length of the ahoge and trimmed it to be slightly more narrow than the final product. I left three inches untouched because it would attach into my wig that way, and the rest of the wire only went to about 2/3 of the length of the longer tuft of hair fibers. Then, it was just a matter of hot gluing one of my caulked hair parts over the wire, and another under the wire, then gluing the ends together. Apologies for not having any pictures of the process, I wasn’t exactly sure that it would work.
Note: Please try to use gloves when working with caulk. And be mindful of any other safety instructions on the back of the package. I know it can be a little trickier to work that way, and sometimes I say “eh, I don’t care” but for the most part, I try to keep my hands out of the icky stuff. Please be kind to yourself :<
Please feel to message me here on tumblr or on my cosplay FB page (Istoria Cosplay) if you have any questions!
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