Making my Marie Antoinette Wig

(I’ve edited this post since finishing the wig so I have the full build process in one post!)

So here’s my fumbling around with wigs. I really hate styling wigs – I wish I’d had it in my budget to buy a really fantastic custom piece off etsy or something, but, well, obviously I didn’t! So here’s what I did.

This is the wig I started out with. A cheap $20 costume Marie Antoinette wig. I was HOPING it would be use-able, but really I knew it wouldn’t be – it came and it’s cheap, overly shiney and not big enough. So I decided to use it as a base, so it would be completely covered but provide some padding on the inside.

Here’s my main wig – from Epic Cosplay wigs. I LOVE their wigs, they are so soft! (My Hippolyta is from them, too.) This is going to be the outside wig. Once I started playing with this wig and the one above, I realised I wasn’t getting enough coverage out of this one, so…

That brings me to this long blonde Godiva wig I wore once with my Arwen costume (as Galadriel) back in 2004. It got terribly tangled doing our skit that year, so I haven’t touched it since. It’s been in a box for the past few years. So I pulled it out and did the best I could to detangle it, and this one is going to provide the coverage I need.

So basically it’s going to go: costume wig as the base, old tangled Galadriel wig as filler, and nice new pretty wig as the outside.

I wanted it to be taller than the costume wig was, so I made this:

I cut a piece of foam into about the shape I wanted, glued on some extra side pieces for thickness, and then covered it in white spandex. This is the result – after this, I wrapped it in yarn to match the wig colour.

I split open the top of the costume wig, inserted my new foam piece, and handsewed it into place:

That’s more like the height I wanted. Next, I sewed the Galadriel wig into the costume wig – just a few stitches at the front and back. I’ll do a few more later once all the hair is out of the way. Then I started wrapping:

It’s held in place with bobbie pins, with some help from clear Elmer’s Glue, Got2b Freeze spray and some heat from my hair dryer.

So once I get the side parts done, I started curling the ends of the hair. I really didn’t want to lose any of the length (even though the bottom of the Galadriel wig was still pretty tangled), so I curled them, glued them into place and bobbie-pinned them too, just for extra security.

I’m not too terribly concerned with the way they look at this point – they’re pretty rough looking, but remember it’s going to be underneath my main wig, so I’m just twisting them up like this JUST IN CASE they’re seen.

Here it is from the front:

After I finished putting all the hair up the next night, I tried it on and decided it was TOO big.

It was just a tad taller than I wanted, and I wanted a rounder, softer shape. So, time for a little surgery. I pulled the hair off, cut the foam piece out and cut it down to be smaller. (It ended up only being about 1/3 its original size when I was done). I sewed the fabric back around it, and sewed it back into the original costume wig:

Then I just pulled the base wig up over it again, same way as before. Here’s the base wig finished, all pinned in place and done.

Now time to add my main wig! I sewed the front of it to the front of base wig…

She’s a little tipsy. Started pinning my main wig hair up over the base…

Left a few pieces down to be my curls. Pinned everything up and sprayed the heck out of it. It’s not going anywhere.

I was originally going to curl the pieces I left down a little more – but everytime I tried on my test piece it wasn’t working out right, so I decided to leave well enough alone. I got my curls arranged on top as I wanted them, added some hair pins with jewels, my feather I’ve been holding onto for nearly two years, and some pearls in the back, and it’s done…

And that’s it! All finished.

Here it is in action at Dragoncon 2011…