#wefting

And now, the teachings!!!

Here’s what we’ll be working on! You can see a finished weft length, as well as a short carrier yarn that I’ll be documenting the progress of here today.

And here are some materials and tools you’ll need! The crochet hook is optional, I find it useful near the end of a weft. Toothbrush can be replaced by a nail brush or a pet brush if you like, I just like the fine control of a toothbrush. And the comby hair brush is just for big areas, you’ll see what I mean soon.

You’ll also need an iron of some kind, unless you want a very poofy weft. A flat iron meant for hair works wonders, but I can’t seem to find mine so I’ll be using this old guy. I’ll just have to go over both sides of my work.

Let’s begin! First, take a length of yarn about six inches longer than you want your final weft to be. in each end, tie a knot about three inches from the tip of the yarn. This will minimize wasted fiber, as you’re not gonna get more than about three to four inches of length out of any of these kinds of yarns, generally speaking. There are exceptions, and you can and should experiment!

As you can see, the space between my end knots is very small. that’s because I’m just making a tiny weft. you may want much longer wefts and that’s okay! Do what’s right for your project. The process will be the same, there’ll just be more of it.

Next, unravel the yarn at one end of your weft. Then brush it out a little, and then, press it straight. then you’ll want to finish brushing it out.

Now you’ve got an end done and you can see how long your finished weft fibers are likely to be. Neat! But nowhere near ready to use. Let’s cut some strands. I like to use my fingers as a wrap board, and this gives me roughly six inch strands, which is perfect for my yarn.

Unravel a few of your new strands! You’ll end up with curly strands that are much thinner. They’ll also be fiddly and a little fragile, because we’ve taken all the structure of the yarn apart.

Now, you need to get these little guys onto your carrier yarn. The way I like to do this is to fold the strand in half, and secure it around the carrier yarn by passing the ends through the loop formed by the folded middle, like so:

This is where the crochet hook can help, if the ends are being too fiddly.

now pull that little loop snug to the carrier yarn, and slide it to the brushed out end, and attach the rest the same way!

keep going! this is one of the more tedious bits, but you want a decent sized bunch of strands.

Remember how we brushed, ironed, and then brushed the very end? Now’s a fine time to repeat that. You can use the bigger brush now if you want to.

Now, repeat those steps until your weft is full up. When you get to the far end, unravel and brush/press/brush the tail end and then brush it up into the rest of the weft for a fairly seamless finish.

Before we begin with the nitty gritty, we first need to learn about wefts! This little guy is the basic building block of any wig (with the exception of a full lace wig). A weft is made up of two parts - first is a strip of fabric or net (also confusingly referred to as a 'weft'), and second is the wig fiber itself, which is securely stitched down to the netting. Flip your wigcap inside out and you'll see that your wig is made up of many rows of wefts, usually running in the same direction. This is how fiber is attached to your wig. And unsurprisingly, the more wefts you have in your wig, the more fiber you have, and thus the thicker it gets!

Along those lines, a very common way to thicken up a wig is to simply add more wefts to your base wig. These wefts could come from a few places:

1) Purchase loose wig fiber and create your own wefts. This method certainly tends to be cheap, but can be a bit time consuming as you will need to sew all of that fiber to a strip of fabric or net.

2) Buy pre-made wefts. This is an easy route as the weft has already been made for you, but only a handful of wig suppliers offer wefts in matching colors.

3) Purchase a second wig and harvest the wefts. This is the option we will be going over today as it is the most accessible - you can always buy a second wig!   This option also has the added bonus of not requiring any weft trimming - because you bought two identical wigs, the harvested wefts will already be the same length as your base wig's wefts.

Go ahead and flip your 'harvest' wig inside out again and have a look. All of your wefts are stitched down to the solid cap or net of the wig, or they're stitched to the elastic that runs along the bottom of the wig. To free those delicious goodies, we need to rip them off of the cap while still keeping the weft itself in tact.

If you look closely at a weft, you'll see at least two rows of stitching. First is the stitching that sews the actual fiber to the net itself. This is not the stitching you want to pull!! Pulling this stitching out will cause the fiber to simply fall out, which is probably not the look you're going for. Instead we want to remove the second line of stitching, which sews the fiber weft to the wig cap itself.

Let's get started:

Part 1: De-Wefting Your Harvest Wig

1) Prep your harvest wig by either placing it on a wighead or just holding it in your lap. Personally I like to use a wighead because it makes it easy to clip the hair away and keep long hair from tangling, but this is just personal preference.

2) Use a duckbill clip or two to clip away the hair on either side of your weft.

3) Now that your weft is exposed and easily visible, insert your seamripper between the weft and the net. Rip the stitches out.

NOTE: Why insert the seamripper like this instead of just ripping the stitching on top of the weft? This is an easy way to be sure that you are pulling out the RIGHT line of stitching - the one that connects the weft to the cap. If you pluck out the topstitching, you run the risk of accidentally pulling the stitching line that sews the fiber to the weft itself.

4) Begin pulling the weft away and ripping additional stitches until you reach the end of the weft and can remove it from the cap.

Congratulations! You have a shiny new weft to play with! Continue to repeat this process to remove additional wefts from the wig's cap.

5) Once all of the wefts near the wig's crown are removed, you'll reach the bottom half of the wig. These wefts are not sewn down to netting, but instead are attached to several elastic bands. The great news here is that these are even easier to remove as there is not as much stitching! Just insert your seamripper as before, and pluck out those few lines of stitching holding the weft to your elastic.

After some time, you'll find yourself with an entire wig's worth of wefts. If your wig is a layered style or if the top is shorter than the bottom, try to keep this in a vague sort of order so that you can add them into your base wig in roughly the order you pulled them from. This will save you from accidentally adding a short weft to a spot that calls for a long weft.

Bonus questions:

Q: I hate seamripping. Can I just use scissors to cut the wigcap on either side of the weft?

A: Sure! Just be sure to trim that netting down, as otherwise you might end up with a very fat weft that is more difficult to glue down.

Q: I ripped my weft into two by accident! What do I do!

A: Don't panic! This is really not a big deal and odds are that you will do this a few times while de-wefting. Just keep the two pieces together for when you add them into your base wig, and sew/glue them in side by side.

Part 2: Wefting Into Your Base Wig

With our huge stash of wefts ready to go, it's time to begin adding them to your base wig. As a general rule of thumb, to create a double-thick wig, you want to add every new harvested weft between two existing base wefts. This evenly distributes your fiber throughout the wig. However if you want an even thicker wig you can add more wefts, or if you just want extra hair in one spot, just add wefts to that area! It's really up to you!

1) Prep your base wig by placing it on a wig head. Stretch your wig over the head and securely pin it at the front, base, and ears. Stretch the elastic on the lower sides and pin them down so that they remain stretched. This is an important step that you do not want to skip - remember that most wig heads are smaller than human heads. Because we are sewing or gluing down material, you do not want to accidentally 'shrink' your wig by sewing these wefts in too tightly.

2) Begin at the base of your wig. Use your duckbill or alligator clips to clip away the hair above the bottom most weft, exposing both that base weft and the empty netting right above it where we will add our harvested weft.

3) Add a thin line of tacky glue to your harvested weft. I like tacky glue because it's easy to wipe out of wig fiber if you make a mistake and I hate handsewing with a passion.

4) Place your weft against the base wig netting and push several straight pins into the weft, spacing them out every 1 - .5 inches or so. These pins will keep the weft pressed into the net as the glue dries, so do not remove the pins for several hours.

Alternative sewing-friendly option:

Place your weft against the base wig netting. Using a sewing needle or curved needle, stitch your weft into the wig net, sewing along the entire weft.  I personally use glue because I am terrible at hand stitching. However the down side here is that it takes quite a while to dry, and while fairly secure unless you yank on the hair, is not as secure as handstitching. Pick whichever method you prefer!!

5) Remove your duckbill clip and fold down the base wig weft that is right above the harvested weft that you added. Re-clip the hair away, exposing that new base weft and the netting space just above it. Add another weft by repeating steps 3 and 4.

6) Once you reach the elastic portion of the wig, you will need to stitch or glue you weft only to each elastic.  If using glue, you may find it easier to dab the glue directly onto the elastic before pinning the weft into place.

7) Continue re-clipping and adding new wefts every other row, working your way up toward the crown until you have added all of your wefts.

You should now have a noticeably thicker wig with TONS of fiber! This is my favorite way to prep for spiking because the hair is so thick it often wants to stand up on its own.

Bonus questions:

Q: Can I hot glue my wefts in?

A: Sure. I have done this when I'm in a rush, but bear in mind that strings of hot glue in wigs are no fun - it is pretty hard to stay 100% clean when putting a hot glue nozzle this close to a wig. Also I do not recommend hot gluing to the elastic half of the wig because you will compromise the stretch.

Q: My weft is longer than my wigcap, even when the elastic is stretched. How should I attach it?