or, How to make your Uncomfortable Costume Comfortable in Two Easy Steps
I was pretty well pleased with Meg, at the end of the weekend.
But, the first time I wore it on Saturday, I made a huge, rookie mistake. I should have known better. I put my Meg wig on and everything felt fine. The problem with the wig cap being WAY too big was still there, so I had to put several pins around the bottom to keep it against my head. I only put 2-3 pins in the front, and it felt fine. The ponytail wasn’t pulling, and I thought this is great, so different from my Ame-Comi Wonder Woman wig.
20 minutes later, every step I’m taking is causing my wig to shift backwards. The ponytail is pulling back, and pulling the whole thing back. Again, I should have known that would happen. Luckily I had all those extra pins in the back of my wig, so I sat down, pulled about half of them out, and dotted them across the front of the wig. That held it “ok” – still not great and I had to repin every few minutes – but mostly it just hurt. Towards the end, as we headed back to the room, I just resorted to either holding the ponytail to keep it from pulling, or holding onto the front of my bangs to keep it from pulling. Everytime I had to let go for pictures, I could feel it sliiiiiide and then OUCH as the bobbie pins held on.
(pictured: unhappy)
To top it off, I had decided to wear my Hippolyta sandals, just with the front panel popped off. They DID look better than the flat sandals (my old Kingdom Come Wonder Woman sandals) so that’s what I went with — and after a few minutes my feet were killing me. I was seriously regretting it. I had to take them off after a while, and walk back to the room barefoot.
So I was an unhappy camper after that first wearing. So, I set about fixing the problem for the second wearing.
First, I was extremely lucky I had a sew-in wig comb in my makeup box. I had thrown it in there for Star Wars day, because I had thought about sewing it onto my Leia hood. I pulled out my sewing kit and sewed that wig comb into the top, set back from the front about an inch. It made ALLLLL the difference in the world. The wig stayed in place with no painful bobbie pins during the second wearing.
Second, I said forget it to BOTH sets of sandals I’d brought with me. I wore my everyday brown leather flip-flops. HOORAY – happy feet. So I was able to wear Meg for about 3 hours with no issues, and was still pretty comfortable by the end of the night.
(pictured: happy)
Now – post-con tweaks and clean-up…. I need to keep tacking pleats, and possibly re-do a few of the last minute ones I did last week, since they’re not really sitting right. Recurl the wig (again – the curls in the front got a little loose) and perhaps sew down some of the ponytail hair/straighten it a bit so it’s not so fuzzy and frizzy everywhere right behind my head. I need to rehem the very front, it ended up being a little long. I also may re-do my “slip” – although the only time it shows was in these seriously windy pictures and I doubt it would ever be a problem again – but if I put some snaps on so the edges of it line up with the edges of the dress, that’d probably work better.