Tinkerbell Wig Tutorial

This is a tutorial for how I styled the wig for the Tinkerbell costume I made as a commission. It uses similar techniques as the buns I made for my Primera costume. Using some sort of foam seems to be the most popular way to style shapes into wigs. But if I can figure out a way to use fabric for something I'm going to do that since I feel more comfortable with it. And since this bun has a fleece base it can be pinned into the wig and removed so that the wig can be washed and used for other things if desired.

For pictures of the completed costume you can check out the entry for it on ACP: [link]

Materials needed: base wig, matching loose hair, similarly colored fleece, matching thread, curved needle, rubber bands, calk, styling product(I just used hairspray), scissors, large safety pins.

1. Tie together a generous clump of loose hair that matches the wig with a cut rubberband. The base wig I was using was a blend of the colors 24 and 613, so I got loose hair in those colors and blended them together for the bun. Trim the ends of the hair so that they're fairly flush with each other. Generously apply caulk to the end and push it into the fibers so that they'll be well connected. Walk away and let the caulk dry. After the caulk has dried you can also remove the rubberband. This picture shows the caulk dry.

2. Sew together a donut of fleece the size you want your bun to be. I rolled the fleece up to the volume I wanted and then sewed the ends together.

3. Insert the caulked together hair into the donut hole. Sew it in place at the bottom of the bun/caulked end of the hair. You shouldn't have problems running the curved needle through the dried caulk.

4. Wrap the hair around the donut one section at a time and stitch into place. Use overlapping stitches. When the excess hair starts crisscrossing and getting in your way you can trim off some of the excess length. And what I did is go around the bun once with just enough hair to cover it and then went back over thin spots with hair I still had left. I was just trying to be careful and make sure everything would be covered.

5. Continue wrapping and stitching until the whole donut is covered.

6. Caulk the mess out of the ends of the hair within the ring of stitching. Walk away, finish your costume, come back a few days later and see if it is dry. Seriously I used so much caulk here that I set it aside for about a week to dry. This picture shows the caulk wet.

7. Once that is finally dry you can do any more styling you want to it and pin it to the base wig. All I did to it was hairspray it and blow dry it a bit before pinning it on. With the really big safety pins you only need two, but you could use more if you wanted. I pinned it on with two pins along the inside of the center of the wig. This left the back pin popping out a bit but this wig is going to be worn with a ribbon around the base of the bun that will hide this. If you were really concerned about that though just play around with where you want to pin it, maybe loose the one in back and put some on the sides instead.

8. The wig is ready to go! Well it is unless you need to do any styling to your base wig, though I would suggest doing that before adding on the bun. We decided to cheat and not do this as a real updo wig, since styling a wig like that is way more complicated and takes more resources. But from what I could tell from looking at pictures this is similar to what they do for Tinkerbell at the Disney parks. It is a short smooth wig with an attached bun to give the illusion of an updo. The base wig I used for this was a Melissa style from amphigory.com in color 24/613 that I trimmed the long side bits on but otherwise left as is.