Ok! I’ve been meaning to make this tutorial for ages and I finally did, so buckle your seatbelts and grab your hot glue we have a hair bow to make.
This is my first time writing a big tutorial, sorry if some things are unclear but feel free to message me with any questions!
Materials:
Arda Luthien Silky in Thistle*
Arda Long Wefts Silky in Thistle
Floral foam circle thing (like this, but don’t buy it on amazon, buy it at michaels or the dollar store)
Stiff felt
Acrylic lavendar paint
Clear tacky glue
Hot glue
Got2be glued hairspray
Comb
Scissors
Duckbill hair clips
*Wig is currently out of stock because Arda is redesigning their Silky wigs. You could use Arda’s classic line, but especially for the wefts, I highly reccommend Silky. I never had a problem with tangled hair and that saved me both time and sanity.
1. Straighten, cut, and style your base wig. The good news is you don’t have to cut the bangs literally at all, they just get combed/clipped to the side. The bad news is her hair is significantly shorter than the Luthien, so have fun with that. I made her front parts that hang over her shoulders shorter than the rest, but that’s up to you (there were very few references at the time).
(yes it is mounted on top of a swiffer, I was on vacation and away from my usual less-silly looking microphone stand)
2. Make your bow base. I used about 1/3 piece of the floral foam for each side, and hot glued the felt to it to construct the rest. I stuffed small discarded pieces of floral foam throughout the middle so that the felt wouldn’t collapse on itself. Paint the whole thing a similar color to the wig so it won’t noticeably show through. Remember, it doesn’t have to look pretty, it just has to have the right structure!
3. Grab your long wefts, cut off a small section, and glue it on! The middle of this bow will be covered by a large ribbon, so you can have the ends of wefts and hot glue showing like its no big deal. I would start by hot glueing the top of the weft in the middle, wrapping it around as shown, using clear tacky glue on the floral foam parts, hot glue again in the middle on the opposite side, and finishing it off with hot glue on the first side. Sorry I didn’t take pictures of that, its ugly as heck but guess what that’s ok!
Here’s me experimenting with how to wrap it around the top. It’s gotta look bad before it looks good.
Use Got2be Glued hairspray to tame flyaway hairs/get wefts to stick together as you add more.
And done! I used about 4/5 of the package of wefts (which is a lot believe me). Now we just have to attached it to the base!
4. Now this part really stumped me, and if you can come up with a better method then by all means let me know. But what I eventually did that worked was glue two duckbill clips (the kind you would use while cutting hair) to the middle, and two pieced of felt over them so they would not come off. The key here is using an absolute crapton of hot glue, but I can say after wearing it at a convention that it holds with no problems.
The way I angled the clips makes it incredibly difficult to get the bow on by myself, so do better than me and take that into account.
5. Done! Go make those accessories and remind everyone that you’re the
baddest bitch in Hoshido
(Photo by Tobious Photography)