finishing the wig alterations

This is the final post regarding the wig alterations I recently finished.

As a reminder, I needed to alter four wigs for a dance troupe. The wigs were almost waist-length but needed to be lengthened and braided so that the braids ended at the hips. In previous posts, I described how to straighten synthetic hair (which turned out to not be necessary for this project) and how to create hair wefts using loose braiding hair. This post summarizes the completion of the project.

I determined where to place the hair wefts using two wefts per wig. Both were placed below where the top of the ears would be when wearing the wig but not along the bottom edge of the wig.

The wigs I altered are mainly composed of a breathable mesh material that wefts of hair are sewn onto. In the picture below, you can clearly see the wig mesh against the white background. I inserted the extra-long wefts I created between two rows of wefts that were part of the original wig. You can see a silver pin holding my weft in place in the left half of the picture below.

I sewed my hair wefts in place on the wigs. Although I chose to use my sewing machine to do this, hand sewing would have been a perfectly respectable, maybe even preferable, way to do it.

Next came thinning out the hair on the original wig. To demonstrate why it’s necessary to thin the wig, I braided one section of hair. As you can see in the picture below, the braid as seen in the left half of the picture is noticeably bulkier than that shown in the right half. There’s a fairly clear line of demarcation where the original wig hair ends and the extensions continue. It looked terrible.

I only thinned the hair originating on the top half of the wig. Using thinning shears, I thinned it in several places down the length, careful not to thin the extensions. As you can see in the picture below this created a much less noticeable transition between the original wig hair and my extensions.

Six braids were created for each wig, then carefully wrapped up to hand over to the dance troupe for their use during folkloric Uzbek dance performances.