When we left off, you were setting aside your cut up pieces of hair to let the caulk/epoxy harden and do its thing. Now, we’re going to make the odangos for the wig.

First thing first, if your bundles of hair are not straight (and if you took them off of the wig like I told you too, then they aren’t, they’re slightly curved) then go ahead and break out your hair straightener (or iron) and turn it on as low as it will go. Arda-wigs’ wigs are heat styleable, which is pretty awesome, but you still don’t want to risk melting the wig with a super high heat hair straightener.

As you can see, the top bundle has already been straightened, and the bottom one hasn’t. Just take your straightener and run it through small sections of the hair at a time until it’s all nice and straightened out.

Now we want to firmly attach the ponytails to the stubs on the wig, so grab those and temporarily secure them to the stub on the wig with a rubber band. Grab your needle (I went with a curved one this time, it works better because the hair is so thick, but use a straight one if that’s all you’ve got) and your thread again, and (you know the drill) secure that sucker to the wig as tightly as you can. When you’re done, give the ponytail a good tug and see how it’s doing. If it’s secure, it’ll try to bring the whole wig with it, if not, it’ll be obvious that it’s loose.

I may have gone overboard with the thread, but there’s no such thing as making it too secure.

Next you want to grab your foam balls and a butter knife. First, poke a pen or marker straight through the ball to start, and carve out enough from one hole to make it large enough for the end of your bundle of hair to fit through. You may want to make it even a bit smaller than it needs to be, because the hot glue will melt it a little bit and make it larger. Then you want to hold up the other side of the ball to your stubbed wig, and mark with the knife (or a marker) around the first stub (the part attached to the wig) and then carve that part out. Make sure you carve out a lot of the inside as well, since these need to sit flat on the wig, and you want your stubs to fit snugly in there.

Then you’ll want to hold it up to the stubs again, and again with the marker or knife, mark where the second stub is (the one attached to the long ponytail) and then carve that out as well. You’ll also want to make these holes just a bit bigger so that once you add lots of hair to the ball (making the hole a bit smaller), you’ll be able to fit the ball right over the stubs no problem.

Once they’re nice and carved out, I like to hold the ball up to the wig again, and look in the hole in the other side and make sure the hair stubs have lots of room, in case the bundle of hair goes into the hole a bit further than expected (this happened the first odango I made, big mistake, but things happen).

Yay! Lots of room!

Anyway. now you want to grab your bundle of hair and hot glue, and put on a nice TV show or movie, because this is going to take a little while. I think it took me maybe an hour or so per odango, because I was taking my time and doing it as neatly as possible. I also used the hot glue gun helper for this part; the hot glue gun rested on the mat while I used the finger cup to help me press down into the hair. Let me tell you, you’re going to get  lots of burns if you don’t protect your fingers in some way.

Insert the end of the bundle of hair into the hole after putting a ring of hot glue in there to hold it in. After the hot glue has set and the bundle is secure, start pulling up one little section at a time, put a line of hot glue down on the inside rim of the foam ball, trim the hair to where it will be just long enough to go a bit inside to ball, and then quickly press it down into the hair. The finger cups I was using made it possible to get in there while the glue was still hot and really push the hair down into the glue, so that it wasn’t necessary to have to keep going in with more glue for that one bit of hair. (Also, in the above picture, you can see that not all of my hairs are the same length- this is why you need to make sure that all the hairs are long when you make your bundles. I’ll show you how to fix this later, though, if you do run into this problem!)

This is how you want to hold the hair: hold the bottom part with your thumb, and the top with two fingers, and that will make it easier to cut the hair shorter where you need to. Don’t let go of it with your thumb, you don’t want to get stray hairs.

This is what it should look like on the inside after your first few pieces of hair are glued in: the hair should lie flat, and be covered with hot glue, so that you know everything is nice and secure. Repeat these steps until the entire foam ball is covered and all of the hair in the bundle is used.

For those of you who may have some shorter hairs in the bundle, what you want to do is get some Got2B hair freeze spray and spray the crap out of the pieces that are sticking out, then hold them down with your finger until they’re nice and smooth.

As you can see, I had a lot of stray hairs in mine. If your end product looks like that, grab the hair spray again, spray all over the odango, and then smooth everything out with your hands, then sit it down and let it dry completely.

Now that it’s nice and smooth, we’re going to cover up the dimple that was left by the bundle of hair. If you don’t mind the dimple, then skip this step. Grab another long piece of hair from your extra that you cut off in the beginning, and make sure it’s long enough to go from one side of the odango to the other, and also thin enough that it’s going to fit nice and tight across the top of the odango and not slip down.

Attach one end of the piece of hair to the inside of the odango, and let the hot glue set. Then gently wrap it around straight up, over the dimple and to the other side, smoothing as you go (use the hairspray if you need to). Finally, glue the other end firmly on the inside of the other side of the ball, making sure that it’s pulled tight.

No dimple, and it’s nice and smooth! After all the glue is set (shouldn’t take long!) carefully put the odango over the stubs on the wig, and keep working with the position until it’s flat against the wig on all sides. (I’m not going to lie; I messed up on my first one, and there is a gap on one side, but I will show you how this can be covered.)

Now put hot glue (carefully, we don’t want to get it all over the wig) all over the stubs and the thread around the stubs, and then right on the inside and around the edge of the odango, and carefully sit it over the stubs for one last time, and again make sure that there are no gaps on any of the sides.

You can’t tell, but there are no gaps on the front side- just a small one on the back. I’m going to be covering it by wrapping a piece of hair around the base of the odangos.

Now make another odango for the other stub, glue it on, and presto! You’re almost finished! :D

In the next and final tutorial for the Sailor Moon wig, I’ll show you how we made the red and white hair pins for the buns, and how I trimmed and curled the bangs, and curled the sides of the wig.