Saving Anna Valerious

This weekend is exciting because it’s a PHOTOSHOOT weekend!! Hooray! I’m shooting my Arwen Blood Red Dress, my original Arwen dress and Ozma of Oz – all because I got a new wig from Arda a couple months ago for these costumes in particular (the wig I used to use became Ame-Comi Wonder Woman’s ponytail back in 2008….). I’m also planning to shoot Ame-Comi Wonder Woman (hey! speak of the devil), Bespin Leia, Janet Snakehole, and maybe my Imperial Officer.

And I’m also planning on shooting Anna Valerious, and Lessa of Pern. I’ve been pulling out costumes pieces, ironing, repairing, etc… and one of the things I needed to tackle was my Anna Valerious wig.

“What!” You might say, if you’ve seen my Anna costume. “But you don’t wear a wig with Anna!” And you’d be right – 99%% of the times I wore this costume, I curled my own hair:

Me as Anna Valerious

But, my hair was never long enough, or dark enough to really pull off the character. After I went a tad more red for Mara Jade in 2005, I thought I’d spring for a wig. I wore it at MidSouthCon 2005:

It looked awful. Of course, part of the reason it looked awful might be due to the circumstances it was worn in. That photo above paints a perfect picture of one of the silliest nights I’ve ever had a convention. I’d been in the costume contest earlier, in my brand new Queen Amidala costume. My friend M and I wanted to stay and go to some of the parties, but we didn’t have a room at the hotel, and it was already very late, so obviously we didn’t want to drive the 35-40 minutes back to one of our houses to change… so I scrubbed my Amidala makeup off in the public bathroom, got changed in a stall, threw this awful wig on to cover up my post-Amidala hair, and put the Amidala costume back out in my car. All of this done with already a few drinks in us, so it’s no surprise that that wig is sitting at a jaunty angle on my head. The only photos that exist of it are a handful friends took – I took none of my own.

But the story of that above photo continues…. my friend M and I are just having a good time, dancing around, drinking, we had glow sticks, this random dude from the 501st came up and commented on my wig — “I’ve never seen your real hair before!” — he thought it was my real hair. He thought that thing above was my real hair. M and I just burst into annoying girl giggles over it. (I went on to marry that guy who thought that was my real hair…)

So we’re just carrying on, and at some point we turn around… and there’s my cousin Catherine! She said she couldn’t come to the con because she was too busy studying! But she came! She’s here! We ran over and hugged her, all excited, only to quickly realize that she’s not here for fun. She’s mad.

Turns out that not only had we lost track of time… it was also Daylight Savings, and it was an hour later on top of THAT. It was nearly 4 AM! Our parents had been trying to call us, worried sick why we weren’t home. They’d finally had to call Catherine, and she got up (she arrived at the con in her pajamas) and came down to the hotel to find us.

So that photo above captures that magic moment. We were on our way out. M and Cath are standing at the top of the stairs behind me, and I’m just in la la land with that stupid wig on my head.

So I got off track. While I brought Amidala in out of my car fairly quickly, Anna Valerious laid in the backseat of my bug where I’d dumped it for a few weeks. That wig was pretty much toast at that point. I finally got it out of my car, threw it in a bag, and that’s where it’s been ever since. I’ve pulled it out and looked at it a few times – I considered using it for Padme Funeral but it was too dark – but its age, mistreatment and poor storage have resulted in a frizzy mess. See:

But if I’m going to shoot Anna, I wanted to TRY to get it back into a wear-able state. I figured I had nothing to lose… I threw it on a wighead and worked the worst of the tangles out with my fingers. Above is what it looked like as of yesterday afternoon.

Last night, I got my foam curlers out and rolled it up:

And today while I was home for lunch, I boiled up some pans of water:

(Ended up I only needed the 2 big ones to fill the sink)

And I dunked my wig in it. You may be surprised to learn that only in the last 4-5 years have I actually learned how to curl wigs. I never knew you had to let them cool off before removing the curler. Of course, I come from an era where you didn’t try to curl any kind of wig unless you wanted a gunky mess — I used to use glue for everrrrrrrrything. Anyway, I got the wig dunked in the hot water, and set it up to cool/dry over the afternoon:

So we’ll see what happens. (Yes, after all that, I don’t even have a resolution to the whole story yet)
Hopefully I’ll have something that looks somewhere decent when I unroll it. If not, I’ll just wear my Padme funeral wig… haha.