Making a Wig for Barbie You Create Dolls

The Barbie You Create Kit dolls wear straight and Afro-textured wigs.

After making a wig cap for the Barbie You Create Kit dolls and determining that all three needed Afro-textured hair, I made an Afro wig. I used my saved hair (shed after washing and/or combing it) and hair saved over the last 18 months or so of my mother's life each time I washed and/or combed her hair. Our hair was stored in separate Ziploc bags. 

I retrieved the bags of hair, paper tape, Aleene's Tacky Glue, and scissors before beginning the wig-making process, following the steps outlined in my previous post to make a wig cap. Rose was my model.

Rose's Saran-wrapped and paper-taped head is illustrated in this photo and in the next.

 

Paper tape has become my new go-to for doll repairs.

 

With the head appropriately wrapped, several layers of Aleene's Tacky Glue were applied next.

After each layer of glue was applied, the doll's head rested on a doll stand to allow each layer to dry before applying the next.

Another layer of glue was applied and allowed to dry.

A third layer of glue was applied and allowed to dry.

 

After several layers of glue, the cap was firm enough to trim the excess plastic from the bottom edge. 

Wig cap #2 is ready for hair.

Rose tried the wig cap on after the excess plastic was trimmed.

Our hair was removed from Ziploc bags.

I began by gluing my hair on first because I only wanted the wig to have a patch of blonde.

Some black hair was added, and a line of glue was added before more hair was placed on the wig cap.

Black hair is glued all around. I left a space to add a patch of blonde hair.

Black and blonde hair cover the wig cap, and it rests on a doll stand to dry.

This is almost the final result; however, I added more black hair to fill out the sides and to cover some of the blonde area to prevent it from looking like a bald spot. 

After all the hair was added to the wig cap and allowed to dry, excessive hair strands were trimmed to create a perfectly round Afro. 

After adding white stud earrings, Rose modeled the wig in this picture and in the next.

The black and blonde wig matches her white-thread-trimmed black jacket.

In my fashion doll wig stash, I found a half loc'd wig handmade several years ago for a 1/6 BJD. I never liked the wig on the doll it was made for and kept it stored in a Barbie case. Caro (who gave the brown curly wig to Minh) tried this wig on.

The half-loc'd wig looks okay on Caro.

One side of this wig has locs; the other side gives the appearance of short-cropped hair.

Caro decided she'd wear the half loc'd wig occasionally but prefers Adele Makeda's Afro wig as illustrated next.

Rose, Minh, and Caro look fabulous in their Afro-textured wigs.

Related Links

You Create Barbie 

Barbie Basics Model 3

You Create Barbie Kit No. 003 Part 1

You Create Barbie Kit No. 003 Part 2

Before I Take A Break

Making a Wig Cap

__________

All photos and text are copyrighted and cannot be used elsewhere unless permission is granted by the author.

©Black Doll Collecting/dbg

There are countless items to collect and write about. Black dolls chose me.

__________

Thank you for reading. Comments that are not spam are appreciated. Spam comments will not be published, so don't waste your time. To contact me directly regarding dolls or any of my posts, please use the contact form on the right of the home page, which is visible in "web view." A link to web viewing should be visible at the bottom of this page.

If you're not already a subscriber, visit, "like" and follow the Black Doll Collecting Facebook page or bookmark the Black Doll Collecting home page and visit on Tuesdays and Thursdays when typically new posts are published.

Check out what I am selling here. 
Check out my eBay listings here.
Please follow my sister blog Ebony-Essence of Dolls in Black.
*New*Visit/Follow DeeBeeGee's Virtual Black Doll Museum
Donate here to support this blog. Thank you!

Tina's Newest Wig

Tina wears a wig by Tonner made for Lizette.

Tina tried this wig on the day she arrived when the above photograph was taken. This wig was supposed to be an Afro wig for Tonner's All-Natural Lizette. Lizette only wore it once before I stored it with similar-size wigs. While stored, the coils and curls had gone flat. 

Plan A

While contemplating whether I should buy Tina an Afro wig or make one for her using my saved hair, I decided to do the latter and cut the hair from the Tonner wig and use that wig cap to apply my saved hair.

Instead of following through with Plan A (to make a wig using the Tonner wig cap), Plan B ensued.

Plan B

I lifted the fibers of the Tonner wig with a plastic bristle brush with widely spaced bristles to create the desired Afro for Tina. The process of lifting the fibers loosened the curl pattern to create more natural-textured fluffed-out fibers.

Tina models her new-to-her wig below.

This doesn't look like the same wig as seen in the first picture, does it?

Full view

From the back

Her hair accessory has been added.

I think she likes it.

I like it.

Yes, she likes it.

Thanks to the fluffed-out Tonner wig that now looks great on Tina, I'll get to use my baggie of hair for something else. 

dbg


There are countless items to collect and write about. Black dolls chose me.
__________
Thank you for reading. To contact me, please use the contact form on the right of the home page, which is visible in "web view." A link to web viewing should be visible at the bottom of this page.

Check out what I am selling here. 
Check out my eBay listings here.
Please follow my sister blog Ebony-Essence of Dolls in Black.
*New*Visit/Follow DeeBeeGee's Virtual Black Doll Museum
Donate here to support this blog. Thank you!

Mama's Hair

When purchased in July of this year, as I wrote in my blog post that includes Barbie Fashionista 82, "I have plans for Fashionista 82 as soon as time permits."

After my mother was placed on an antiarrhythmic medication in June of this year, she began experiencing extreme hair loss.  Each time she combed her hair, wads of it would be in the comb.  The first time it occurred, she was in the hospital and asked me to throw the hair away.  I told her I wanted to keep it and explained why.  After that hospital stay, she remained on the medication until a follow-up visit with her cardiologist took place.  He instructed her to discontinue the medication as hair loss was one of the side effects of amiodarone.

After discontinuing amiodarone, the hair loss continued but was not as marked as it was during the time she was taking the medication.  I continued saving the hair and had enough to fill a sandwich-size Ziploc bag before the hair loss eventually subsided.

Mama's saved hair

Due to recent life changes, I have more free time on my hands and am able to complete doll-related things that have been on my to-do list.  One of these things was to make a wig for Fashionista 82 using my mother's hair.  Because I like the doll's buzz cut platinum blonde hairstyle, I opted to make a removable wig to allow her to return to the original hairstyle, if desired.

Things Used

In addition to the doll, to make the wig I used:

• Rubber bands
• A piece of white fabric (tan would have been better to blend in with the ash blonde color of Mama's hair, but white fabric is what I had on hand).
• Plastic wrap
• Aleene's Tacky Glue
• Hair
• Scissors
• Pencil

Making the Wig Cap

Enough fabric to cover the doll's entire head, neck, and breast area was cut.  

Not shown, plastic wrap was wrapped around the doll's entire face, head and upper torso to protect these areas from glue.  The plastic wrap was held in place with a rubber band around the doll's neck.

The fabric was placed snugly over the plastic wrap and held in place with a rubber band around the neck.  The wrinkles in the fabric were smoothed out as much as possible, particularly in the area that would create the wig cap.  Using a pencil, the outline of the area that would be the wig cap was drawn.

Aleene's Tacky Glue was applied to the area inside the pencil tracing which would be the wig cap.  Several layers of glue were applied by smoothing each onto the wig cap area with my index finger.  Each layer of glue was allowed to dry before applying the next.

The glue was allowed to harden for over 24 hours.

The cured wig cap was removed and the excess fabric cut away as illustrated in the next four pictures.

I trimmed off even more of the wig cap than what is illustrated in these photos.  The nape of the neck could have been trimmed more.

Applying the Hair

Beginning from the nape of the neck up, the hair was applied in rows.  In the above photo, one row of hair was added.  Two additional rows were required to cover the back of the head.

In this photo, the hair on the back of the head has been glued on and the head wrapped with plastic wrap to hold the hair in place.

Profile view of the applied hair and plastic-wrapped head illustrates the bare crown and sides of the wig cap.  The plastic wrap was left on for only about 30 minutes.  It was removed to allow the glue to fully dry before additional hair was applied.

Two wads of hair were overlapped for the crown and side hair.  The overlapping gives the illusion of a part.

One side of the crown hair is applied.

Both sides of the crown hair are applied.

View from the back with all hair applied

Plastic wrap was again applied to hold the crown and side hairs in place.  Rubber bands were placed around the ends hoping these would crimp the loose ends.

For the edge of the wig cap to blend with the color of the hair, it was painted tan.  The inside of the wig cap was also painted, but that was not necessary.

Trimming and Modeling the Wig

All stray hairs were trimmed and 82 or Bea, named after my mother, modeled the wig.

Full-length view of Bea dressed in her original fashion and wearing her wig

Some of the length was trimmed after this photo was taken.

Redressing

Bea is redressed in a Sparkle Girlz fashion worn with Barbie black wedge heels.

Close-up from the front

The hair looks a little matted because, well, it is.  I was working with wads of hair that had been enclosed for months in a Ziploc bag.  There was no way for me to separate the wads without having several small pieces of hair.   The texture of the hair would have worked better for an Afro or another fuller natural hairstyle, but it is what it is.  I have achieved my goal of using Mama's hair on a doll.  I do have some hair left but probably not enough to create another wig unless I ask her to resume saving the few strands of hair she loses when she combs her hair now.

One More Redress

Because it is the Christmas season, I decided to dress Bea in this Mikelman Christmas gown and make jewelry using pieces cut from a rhinestone necklace.

Close-up of Bea's jewelry which consists of a choker and drop earrings

In the two photos above, the wig is placed on Bea's head so that the side part is more visible.  The ends of the hair in the back are swept a bit to one side.

The Mikelman fashion works well with Bea's original platinum blonde hair as illustrated next.

With or without the wig, Bea looks fabulous in this Christmas dress, as fabulous as my mother always looks when she dresses for church or other special occasions.

Mama's Hair Throughout the Years

This photo was taken when Mama was in her late 20s, sometime during the 1940s.

Mama's hair was black and very long when I was young, but she obviously wore it short in her 20s before I was born, as illustrated in the photo above.  I recall her sitting on the floor between Daddy's legs and him scratching her scalp with a comb to lift dandruff.  Neighbor ladies with whom she was friends when I was between the ages of 5 and 8 (and possibly younger) loved to comb her hair.  They would sit outside on the concrete steps of our apartment and the neighbor would comb her hair and style it in two side braids as I played, not far away from my mother's watchful eye, with said neighbor's child or another outside-playing child who lived nearby.

Mama is holding my sister in this photo dated April 1963.  Sister was born in 1961; she was about 18 months old if the photo was processed in the same month it was taken.

By the time I was 12, and when she wore it shorter (because for some odd reason people thought women of a certain age should not wear their hair below their shoulders and by 1967, she didn't), she'd ask me to "scratch" and/or oil her scalp, if Daddy wasn't home to do it.  I believe she began wearing it short again in her mid-30s after the birth of my sister.

During the 1970s, when her hair was still naturally black, she often wore it up with a "wiglet" attached (a hairpiece with ringlets of curls) as shown above.

In this photo taken during the late 1990s for the church directory, Mama's hair was a frosty brown.

Eventually, her black hair would have probably been 50% gray had she not begun having it professionally colored brown or frosty brown beginning in the 1980s and well into the 1990s.

Mama at her house in April 2017 before going to a fellow nonagenarian's birthday party.  Her gray-blonde hair is pulled back with a blonde ponytail clipped on.

By the 2000s and even now, when she feels well enough to travel to the salon, her hair is colored various shades of blonde, usually honey blonde.
The hair clippings used for the doll "Bea" are a cross between Mama's natural gray and the grown-out professionally colored hair.  She gave up perms over a decade ago and she only has it trimmed now... no more short hair unless it is her choice.  She no longer adheres to the rule that women of a certain age should not allow their hair to grow below the shoulders.  After living over nine decades, this nonagenarian has earned that right not to worry about age-related hair standards.

dbg
__________
Thank you for following, commenting, and sharing using the share button below.

Please follow my sister blog Ebony-Essence of Dolls in Black
View the Doll Events page for upcoming doll shows. Check out my eBay listings here.
Thank you for your continued support