Tutorial

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How to make your eyebrows match your wig!

Many times in cosplay, you see brightly colored wigs, but the eyebrows aren’t colored or don’t match. I like to make my eyebrows match, because if that’s the character’s natural hair, then why wouldn’t their eyebrows match?

Materials needed are a white eyeliner pencil, and eyeshadow in the shade (or close to the shade) of your wig.

Your first step is to make sure your eyebrows are groomed. You want them to not be bushy, because that will make them hard to cover. Once they’re nice and groomed, take a white eyeliner pencil, and completely cover your eyebrows with it. Only get the hairs of your eyebrows, or make sure you wipe the excess off later so that you don’t have weird white stuff around your brows. Continue reading →

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SacAnime pictures! (and kind of a review)

Mario and I had a great day at SacAnime! We drove 2 hours to get there, and ended up stopping a few places on the way (since we found out it didn’t open until 1pm on Friday) then arrived right as they opened. There were a few other Team Rocket grunts, an Ash and some good cosplay! We didn’t get many pictures with our camera, but here’s a flickr with a ton of photos from the convention, and it’s going on for today and tomorrow as well, so they should have even more photos up soon.

There were some good vendors there, a neat pajama company that made full pajamas shaped like animals; kangaroos, chickens, and even monsters. Then of course there was the awesome Pocket, who has a video game based webcomic. There were also lots of weapon vendors, with some good Master Swords and Hylian Shields, and we ran into a pretty good Link, too… didn’t have the camera on us, so we didn’t get a picture.

We ran into a Princess Zelda on the way in, which was pretty awesome.

And of course, an obligatory photo of us fighting Ash for his Pikachu.

We left early to have dinner with friends, but it was still a pretty fun day. If we lived closer we would have gotten a weekend pass, because we think Saturday is the day for cosplay, but oh well. Friday was still a fun day.

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Sewing wefts to your wig!

So you’ve cut apart a wig for the wefts, dyed them, and now you’re ready to sew them into your wig as needed. You can add wefts to a wig for multiple reasons; to make it thicker, longer, or if you need to style the wig half up or in such a way that if you left it as is, you could see through the wig.

Materials needed: curved needle, scissors, thread that matches the color of your wig, pins, wig head, and your wig and wefts. You may also want to get some hair clips so you can clip the hair of the wig up while you’re sewing on the wefts.

I’m adding wefts because I need my wig to be able to have a braided headband look, a half ponytail in the back, and two pigtails hanging down out of red orbs behind the ears. I’m only going to show how I add on the wefts in this post, but later on I’ll make one on how I styled the entire wig.

Continue reading →

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Team Rocket Grunt Cosplay! (A tutorial!)

Mario and I kind of forgot about SacAnime until two weeks ago. When we remembered, and realized it was so close, we needed a cosplay that would be quick and easy, and not so harsh on the pocketbook, since we are still elbow deep in our Blizzcon costumes. After much consideration and searching through the internet, we decided that yes! We would be Team Rocket grunts. Not that hard, right? Continue reading →

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How to dye wefts using the FW ink method

Is there a wig that you need for an upcoming cosplay in a color that you just can’t seem to find anywhere? It’s okay, I have your solution! Just find a blond or white wig in the right style that you’re looking for, and dye it!

There are several methods that I know of for dyeing a wig. The first is the sharpie method, where you harvest the ink from several sharpies and dye your wig with it. The second is  the FW ink method, where you use FW ink, which is an acrylic ink, and mix it with alcohol and use that to dye the wig. The last method is using Katie Blair’s wig dye, which is easy and premade for you, but can be expensive if you’re dyeing a very long or thick wig.  I prefer the FW ink method.

Later on I’ll make a tutorial on how to dye a wig using this method, since it is slightly different than doing it with wefts. Again, I apologise for the shadows in the picture, next time I’ll try to get the table moved elsewhere so that we don’t have the shadow from the overhang in our way. Continue reading →

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How to cut wefts from a wig

Back in June, I was searching frantically for some blond wefts that would match my base wig for my Tyrigosa costume. All I found were human hair wefts, wefts that were ridiculously expensive, and loose hair that may not dye right and that I’d have to make into wefts myself.

Then it dawned on me that I could simply buy a second wig (at $25 for a fantastic quality wig that dyes well, it isn’t bad) and cut the wefts from it. Easy peasy. Then I could dye them, and sew them onto my existing wig. Thus starts my series of posts on how to deal with wigs. Hooray!

Today we’ll start with cutting the wefts. I started with this gorgeous wig here:

Ferrari wig in ash blond, from http://www.arda-wigs.com

This is the same type and brand wig that I’m using as my base wig. I’m doing this because, since I am adding wefts that are also going to be dyed to the wig, I want all the colors to be perfectly matching.

Next, you want to turn your wig inside out:

See the lines made by the elastic going down? We’re going to cut those as we cut the wefts from the wig.

As you can see in the photo, I’ve started cutting just one weft at a time. We don’t want them getting tangled up or knotted! Continue in this fashion until you have all the wefts you need. I didn’t cut up the wefts at the very top of the wig because it’s kind of a circle of hair sewn to make it look natural at the top of the head. So! You end up with this:

I didn’t realize how bad the shadow was from my back yard, but it’s the only place I had to put the wefts. Anyway, this is what they will look like all laid out, and ready to be dyed! Stay tuned for my next post on how to dye using the FW ink method!