Dyeing…rather, Discharging

Having done a few panels on dyeing recently, and touched on it only slightly on here before, I thought it was a good time to do some blog posts on dyeing and related activities, especially some of the stuff that goes a bit beyond "buy some Rit, dump it in a bucket".

Therefore, this post is going to center around the idea of discharging dye, using basic easily-accessible means. I started to write up this long block of text about the intricacies of such thing from a chemical/technical side, but realized that 99% of the people who might ever read this would either not really care, or not need to know the specifics of that. So I will just sum it up very briefly…

There are two ways that dye can be removed from fabric chemically; oxidizing agents and reducing agents. Oxidation occurs by "removing" something chemically from the dye, either causing it to "let go" of the fabric, destroying the pigment, or both. (Chlorine) Bleach and Hydrogen Peroxide are good examples of this. Both cause a bit of wear and tear to the fabric with each use, and can cause unwanted side-effects (certain colors removing at different rates, or discoloring), and bleach is the worst culprit of both; bleach can even totally destroy certain fabrics on contact. Metal becoming rusting is a good example of destructive oxidation, when you scrape away the rust to get to the unaffected surface underneath, there is no way to bring back the "missing" metal; each time you use bleach a small (or large) amount of the fabric surface is "scraped away". However, in certain circumstances it is the best or only option. For discharging dyed fabric though, it is often not a good choice.*

Reducing agents (in the context of discharging) instead "add" something to the mix, once heat is applied, causing the dye to release from the fabric into the water that the agent has been added to, and often helping prevent it from reattaching to the fabric. In some cases a chemical process (generally with additional heat) occurs to destroy the dye in place - leaving un-dyed or greatly lightened fabric in its place - without needing to be immersed in water. These are the products that are best used for removing dye from fabric; perhaps something was dyed improperly and you want to give it another go, perhaps you want to try a new technique in certain spots, perhaps you want to revitalize an old garment…all are good candidates.

Now things get a little confusing here, because there are some dyes that must be "reduced" in order to attach to the fabric (indigo dye for blue jeans, for instance, and certain commercial dyes), and therefore the only optimal way to remove them is through oxidation (i.e. bleach, peroxide), but going into all of those details would require a longer post of its own. Needless to say, what I will focus on are reducing agents, but results may vary depending on the type of fabric and whether it was factory-dyed or not).

The most easily attainable discharging product is Sodium Hydrosulfite, usually paired with Sodium Carbonate (aka washing soda, soda ash). You can find this in many "off the shelf" products for fixing dye accidents or color run removal, such as Rit Color Remover or Carbona Color Run Remover.

Dylon makes products called SOS Color Run Remover and SOS Color Remover (for Whites Only), but I have not used them and can not find any MSDS/ingredient info on them, so I don't know how well they work or when they should be used. I would suspect that the first is a typical hydrosulfite-based product and the second is a bleaching product based on the descriptions but I have no way of knowing.

In addition, Jacquard produces an iDye Color Remover; this is a different chemical (Thiourea Dioxide) which is best suited for removing certain types of dyes, specifically fiber-reactive and direct dyes. Their iDye product falls into this category but many others will not and results will be mixed.

Having used both the Rit and Carbona products, I prefer Carbona; for around the same price you get slightly more product, and I have had better results with discharging using a single packet with hot-from-tap water in a washing machine. To make things slightly confusing, Rit has a slew of products with similar names and similar use, and I am just going to quickly mention them here for clarification.

Rit White Wash - This has the Hydrosulfite/Carbonate pair, but also includes water softeners. Based on the description and ingredients I believe it to be a slightly lower concentration and geared towards removing light dye and water/detergent/etc deposits (i.e when your whites begin to "gray" over time)
Rit Whitener and Brightener - Surfactants/Detergents and Optical Brighteners. This is simply a chemical to make whites appear brighter. No lightening action involved based on the ingredients.
Rit Stain Remover - Surfactants/Detergents. Basically a bottle full of concentrated "Stain Remover Pen" liquid.
Rit Rust Remover - This is also Hydrosulfite/Carbonate, with added surfactants and chemicals to inhibit oxidation (presumably to help remove rust stains specifically). Haven't used it.
Rit Fast Fade - This is Sodium Carbonate and Sodium Dichloroisocyanurate (essentially powdered chlorine bleach). This is how you would want to discharge blue jeans/denim, etc, but it's fairly hard on the fabric in the process and will cause unwanted results on certain dyes/fabrics. If this post doesn't get too long, I'll go into this a little at the end.

Anyway, the main reason for all this is that if you find a product that you are not sure of, but it's primary ingredients are Sodium Carbonate and Sodium Hydrosulfite you should be good to go! Unfortunately while Sodium Carbonate is easily available as "Washing Soda" in most stores, (and is good to have on hand for various reasons if you do a lot of dyeing and dealing with fabric), Hydrosulfite is not…which is just as well, as it is hazardous in large quantities and degrades over time. So, it's best to just obtain the small packages of whatever-brand dye remover as you need it.

But enough ramble, on to actual material and pictures!

So I happened upon this sort of sweater-with-built-in-collar and I thought "This would be perfect for that one costume that has an inexplicably collared sweater-thing in its design, well, if only it was red." Normally I would find some other method or just make it, although I don't particularly like sewing knits, and you don't find much in the way of ribbed sweater style knits just laying around on the bolt, much less in a specific shade of red…but anyway. So I had the stuff on hand and I thought I'd have an experiment, and then blog about it as an example! Now one reason I also thought this particular thing was a good candidate was that it was 100% cotton, and it had a warning about washing in cold water only (practically a guarantee that it wasn't colorfast, even when washed normally).

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of when I first began, but only after I had initially wet the garment (and realized I should document the process). Also, just like with dyeing, it is good to prewet the fabric beforehand when doing something like this.




This is the Carbona product I mentioned earlier as well.


Placed in a bucket of hot water (luckily I have tap water that gets extremely hot, scalding even. Well, lucky for dyeing. Not so much when you accidentally turn the tap too far in the shower.) it began discharging immediately. At first it was a sort of brownish-reddish color, but it quickly turned to black, so much so that the bucket looked like it was filled with ink.
I don't have a picture of the later stage, but here is when it first began to discharge.



Now if you are doing this in a bucket, it is ideal to have a fan or good ventilation. It has a very distinctive odor, fairly unpleasant, and it's best to not breathe in a ton of it. It's not exactly toxic gas that you need a respirator for, but at the same time it's not particularly good for you either. If you do it in the washing machine, it seems to be better contained, however.

Ok, so after the first treatment and drying I now had a garment that looked like this:



It's nice and all, but I thought I'd try one more go and see if I could get it lighter; when discharging the first time the water reached a point where there was so much "loose" dye in it that I suspected that no more was leaving the fabric. Unfortunately, here is where an accident happened. I thought I would try something different and use the Rit Fast Fade I had on hand, I'd used it before with good results but didn't really consider the fact that it had chlorine bleach in it. As soon as I added it into the wash (and smelled the overwhelming chlorine assault) I reconsidered my decision, but figured I would just go for it at that point. Not only did it not discharge further, but it left the entire thing stained a very ugly beigey-yellow color, with uneven blotches like water marks, once it dried. Fortunately I was able to resolve this, but there's not pictures at this stage because I worried I had ruined it.

(link for bleach post tba)

After fixing that problem, (mind you, each stage I let the fabric dye fully and "rest" a little before starting again the next day, didn't want to stress it too much), I discharged it one last time, this time in the washing machine. You can see how much dye came out again, despite it being a fairly light shade of gray.



After drying one last time, I ended up with this…it's actually a bit lighter than it appears, but it was night time and indoor lighting and all that.



At this point I figured it was good enough to dye; most dyes, especially on store-bought clothing, will not remove completely, or else not without a substantial amount of wear and tear to the fabric. I had already tormented this enough and it seemed lightened enough, so I figured it was time to dye it. One unpredicted side effect was that the snaps on it had begun to rust, possibly due to the chemicals, or being routinely damp over several days, or both. I intended to replace them anyway, but I removed them at this point. You can actually better see how significant of a difference it is, this way, anyway.




Good thing there's more snaps going back over it, right?

Aaaaaand here's the final product, dyed with Rit Cherry Red. I suppose that was a lot of work to save some time, but hey, it was an adventure, and you learn something new each time, you know?



So, yeah. Cottons and natural fibers will probably discharge best using this method, some synthetics will but the majority of it will not. A "wash with like colors" and/or "cold wash only" care tag is a good indication that the dye might not have a iron grip on the fabric and be easier to dislodge, but it may also mean that the fabric is delicate or may be ruined by hot water. Rayon, silk, acetate…many of these require gentle treatment. However, if you have the time and means to experiment, by all means do! There's a lot of interesting things you can do. Next time, I'll do a post on discharging specific parts of a piece of fabric without having to affect the entire piece. That part is pretty cool, and has a lot of neat possible applications.

Hans, part…whoops.

Well, despite my best intentions of posting all of my progress, I had a few mishaps. First I was in a bit of a time crunch trying to get things done in time for Katsucon so I just took pictures here and there to write up about later, and then the monday after Katsu my phone died in a rather dramatic way, forcing me to get a new phone and also corrupting the SD card (which had all my picture on it) in the process. Since then, I've been especially busy with work, so I haven't had much time to bother with things.

So, I will just put up what little I was able to recover, here…and write a little bit about it, I suppose.

Hans, part 1

While some of the stages of this have been done out of order, I'm trying to finish one piece of the costume at a time, so I can also break it into posts as each is done and "something" is accomplished. At the same time, documenting makes me realize just how overly complicated I seem to make things for myself...I don't know why, but I always end up making more work trying to get things "just right".

So Hans, from Frozen. Working on this for Katsu. First off, his shirt.
Yeah, that thing that you see about 4 inches of at the collar and below his jaunty little magenta cravat or jabot, or whatever it should be called.



When getting the materials for this costume I tried to stick to materials that both made sense in the context of the movie, as well as what they physically looked like in terms of texture and appearance. In the case of Hans, much of his outfit looks like it is made of wool and silks. His shirt is kind of a weird shade of blue, it's not really a light blue, it's not dark either. I'd say it's kind of a "bright royal blue", really. I looked all over for a fabric in that color, or close to it, that also looked similiar...so a fabric with a little bit of sheen and a slight bit of texture. Initially I looked at dupioni and shantung fabrics, and even a few taffetas, both silk and synthetic faux silks, but everything was way too light, dark, or not even close.

Then I randomly came across what looked like the perfect color fabric, in a Jo-ann's.
Unfortunately, it looked like this.




Yeah... it's some sort of polyester taffeta, with this blue-green mesh sewn to one side of it. The color is a bit off with my camera, because my phone takes terrible pics with indoor lighting (and it also kind of sucks in general), but it was such a good find. A little bit of sheen, a nice medium shade of blue, and just a hint of a shot color to it. Of course, I would have to deal with the fact that it was not only crushed up, but had this mesh sewn all over it. Well, I've "uncrushed" this type of fabric before (when I worked on the "Fancy Dreamers" outfits and was on a mad scavenger hunt for 20 shades of purple-pink, I had to take what I could get). Plus, the look might be a good stand-in for silk, with the iridescence and texture, at least from a distance and...you know, while not really looking that much like silk, lol. Better than waiting around for the "perfect" fabric...that has left me dead in the water with productivity before.




Well, an overly long time with a seam ripper, and quite a few episodes of Bones later, I now had the mesh off. Now, to try and flatten it out with the iron. After all, I want to keep a bit of the irregular texture to it, but I obviously don't want it to look like this. Also, I definitely need to flatten it out to cut out, otherwise I will end up with crazy-shaped wonky pieces in the end. First, I threw it in the washer with some Milsoft...that stuff works wonders, it's a fabric softener that makes even the most papery of taffeta gain a bit more drape, and with some it's almost miraculous. Look it up if you're curious. It's mainly for silks and natural fabrics that have been dyed, but I've tried on all sorts of fabrics with pretty good results. Plus, both it and the water should relax the fabric a bit, and then I can iron it while it's still damp.




So it's really annoying to try and iron several yards of wide, slippery fabric. Really, really annoying. But here it is about halfway through. You can see that there is still some "grain" to it, but it's not longer all crumpled and gathered looking...still kinda crease-y though, so a bit more ironing is needed to make it just a texture, and not "I like to leave my clothes crumpled into balls before I wear them". Lots of steam and patience is the key here. Just a little more and it would be ready to cut pieces out, without having to worry about all the creases making things terribly off.




Derping around with muslin, face cropped because it was megaderp mode.




This is probably one of the slightly more accurate shots of the color. Just piecing stuff together here. Also, I don't know if other people do this, but I like to tie off the threads at the end of a dart rather than backtacking with the machine...it help it not do the stupid "dart bubble" that it likes to do in certain fabrics, and as everyone knows I'm infamous for leaving long threads when I finish a seam, so...it's kinda easy. I generally don't clip them until the very end, lol. In the groove, you know?




Aaaand here it is, done. With a possibly temporary stand-in scarf. Not sure how I feel about this one, going to try a few things. But want to get the right "feel" for things.

Whee,  now for, let's see...a vest, pants, and simply-yet-overly-adorned jacket, nay, tailcoat.
Pants next, then vest, and finally the coat. Not just because it's the more complicated piece, but because I want all the proportions right.

It's like the costume is practially making itself! sigh.

Let's try something new...

Well, I keep saying I want to post more on here, and I have a ton of half-finished documentation-type things, and "tutorial"-like things saved as unpublished drafts, but I initially planned this to be a cosplay blog as well, and I've done very little of that.

So, in the pursuit of actually using this, I'm going to put up progress work and photos as I work on my costume, for the next costumes I do. I think that this will help me keep motivated and on task, as well as allowing me to post about it without cluttering up Facebook too much. Guess we'll see~

Katsucon is looming ahead.

Serious backlog...

Not that I've really published this link anywhere, but still. I feel the need to post.

Trying to work through a huge backlog of half-finished posts (currently as unposted drafts, or posts that I didn't like and pulled to modify/revise), culling out the stuff that I think is pointless/unnecessary/half-finished ideas, taking/adding pics, fleshing out the text, etc. However, I've been super-busy over the past 2 3 years, along with random life issues, so I continue to be busy. Hopefully I get a chance to come back to this soon, and don't just let it fall to the backburner for ages again.

Lace Front wigs (aka wig-building 101)

Ahhhh, lace wigs. So classy, so realistic, so.....expensive. That's not even getting into the full-lace wices, nice quality lace-front wigs can start around $70-80 for even basic hairstyles and go up from there, well over $100 for a long wig of good quality. You can sometimes find really good deals if you hunt (I've been able to find lace-fronts as low as $30 but it was a matter of "last in stock" or a discontinued item, etc, so it was more of a purchase of opportunity than being a specific wig I was looking for), and such occasions aren't really reliable or predictable. While I have started to see a handful of lace-front wigs targeted at cosplayers, for instance Arda Wigs has a few I discovered recently, they are still on the higher end, $60 or so when I saw them at a con recently.

However, out of curiosity I looked into what it takes to make a lace wig. Plus, you never seem to find lace wigs in unnatural colors or offbeat styles, and well...I seem to always end up working on those.

I had already seen some of the steps in a theatrical costuming book (Stage Makeup by Richard Corson, pick up a copy if you see it and you have interest in facial prosthetics, hair, and makeup, it's quite informative and useful), but wanted to see if I could find more info. Well, sure enough I did, but there's a lot of information out there and a lot of it might give you stuff like steps A and D, but assume you'll automatically know B and C since most of the people who are doing this have been doing it professionally for years. Either that, or people purposely leave out info, not really sure. I'll assume the best though.


So first off, materials. These are the things you should really have, a lot of which I hadn't heard of before reading the book and looking into it, but they are either necessary, or make life a LOT easier. I'll try to give options for doing it yourself as well, since some of these "specialty" items are quite expensive.

While most sources suggest you have a wig block, and/or make a tape "cast" of your head, that mostly pertains to fully custom wig creation. For just adding a lace front to a wig, you should be ok with a normal styrofoam wig head. However, a wig clamp or other securing device will be necessary.

T-pins. These will be used to pin down the lace when you're working on it.

Ventilating needle. Before I ordered one, and when I hadn't found any inexpensively, I got a feel for doing it with a small crochet needle, a #12 (1.0mm or smaller will work, as small as you can get it is ideal, which seems to be #14, 0.75mm). If you do this, simply bend the end of the needle (you can use your fingers, they're pretty easy to bend), like this [image]. However, you may need to take an emery board or fine sandpaper to smooth out where you bent it, there could be a very snaggy spot where the chrome plating cracks and flakes on most needles at that spot.

However, if you want to just skip this and go straight for the real deal, International Wig has the 1/2 strand and 3/4 strand needles for $6 each, which is a good price. However, I found out when I got mine that the needle is sold alone, you must put it in a handle of your choosing or buy the separate "ventilating needle holder" which is significantly more expensive than the needle alone about $30). I decided to mount mine into a spare paintbrush handle.

Hair lace. While there is in fact specialized lace in various sizes and visibilities, it is all quite expensive. IT can be found at both International Wig and Amphigory as either "Hair Lace" or "Wig Foundation", (specifically for a "hand tied wig"). While the quality is worth it I am sure, especially considering it is usually intended for wigs worn long-term, for a costume I will only wear and handful of times for a few hours, I am willing to sacrifice some durability and comfort if needed. That being said, you can buy rolls of fine-grain tulle in the wedding section of many craft stores, (or even by the yard in fabric stores if not), the pre rolled stuff comes in several colors that are decent semi-near matches for basic skin tones, ivory, off-white, and two shades of brown. Said tulle will only cost you around $3-4 for a roll, or usually $2-3 per yard. The smaller the holes, the less visible and the more hair you can get per square inch, but you don't want to go too small as you won't be able to easily fit the needle, the wedding stuff is a perfect size for the needle I use. For simplicity I will just refer to any of it as "lace" for the rest of this.



Loose hair. Obviously, you need hair of some sort,  the straighter the better, loose or wefted, doesn't matter, whatever you find that is the best match. Wefted hair will need to be cut off of the tracks, however.

Drawing Card. This will save your sanity when dealing with the loose hair. While you can buy one, this is one of the higher-priced items due to specialty, as very few places carry them. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I found out how to make your own and will share that here. (forthcoming)

Hackle Board. Same situation as the drawing card, but this is used mainly to blend the loose hair if you have several shades to mix, it does the job quite well. It also works a bit as an extremely forceful comb to pull out any weak or damaged hairs from the loose hair. Also have information on how to make one of those. (forthcoming)


All right, well, we have all that out of the way....ready?

For most of the pictures, I'm using brown lace and green hair for extra visibility. It's hard to do a lot of this one handed so in some cases you will just have to get the general idea from the picture.

First, you need a wig. I recommend one of the kind that has a slightly "raised up" hairline already as it will be a bit easier to manage (Ie the kind where the hairline has that little "kink" right at the base where the hair lifts up slightly and bends back on itself as opposed to coming straight out and down over the edge). The ones where the hair is down tend to be a bit thicker and harder to sew on, as well as having the wefts positioned oddly (such as coming from underneath the edge and overlapping over to the top). If it's got a skin top, try not to poke holes all the way through it and instead just go through the fabric backing underneath when you sew the lace down.

Ok, so take a piece of the lace, you want a good amount, the rolled kind is good because you can just cut off a length of it and cut it down when you need to. Cut off a piece that can run from ear tab to ear tab across the top of the wig, letting it extend out at least 3-4 inches from the edge of the wig. Using a needle and thread, sew the lace to the underside of the wig just inside the edge, with about an inch underlapped beneath the wig. Use medium-sized stitches, firm, but without pulling the thread too tightly.

Put the wig on your head and see how it fits and if the lace is doing anything odd like puckering or tearing. Adjust as needed.

Now, put the wig onto a wig head. Using T-pins, pin at each corner as well as every few inches along the forehead at the front edge. Pin at the edge of the lace rather than directly through it to avoid piercing/tearing the lace.

Now, you're ready to go! Here's where it gets a little tricky, and what took me a little while to figure out how to get right.

First, press your loose hair into the drawing card if you have one, or else lay it out loose in the package and hope for the best. Either way, you want the ends of the hair facing you within easy arm's reach.

Holding the needle in one hand, pull out 1-3 strands with your other hand. (For hair rooted very close to the wig, you can use 2-3 at a time, however this will cause a more visible "dot" where the hair is knotted, so as you get further from the wig you will want to only use one at a time so that it looks natural.)



Double the hair over so that you now have a loop, holding it a few inches below the loop.



Taking the needle, hook it down into the lace and up through an adjacent hole, with the needle facing upwards.


Hook the loop with the tip of the needle, pulling it towards the lace. As you reach the hole in the lace, rotate the needle downwards.


If done correctly, the loop will come through with relative ease to the other side. It will take some trial and error to get right, but once you get the hang it is fairly easy (but tedious). If it feels at all "snaggy" back up and try again, don't force it through as you may tear the lace and while you might be able to get away with one or two single torn holes, more and you will need to start all over from the beginning as it will greatly weaken the lace and cause patchy spots on top of it.


Now, push the hook back through the loop after pulling a few inches of it through, and catch the other side of the hair with the hook. Rotate the hook as you pull so that you loop the hair around the tip, maintaining a light grip on the hair with your other hand as you do so. If all is well, you will then be able to pull the hair back through the loop, grab the ends, and pull them tight so that the loop closes and makes a small knot right at the lace.


Now, repeat as needed. This is the tedious part and could easily take many many hours (10+ easily, depending).

Once you have finished, put the wig on your head and determine where it sits and where you want to cut the lace, you want to cut as close as possible to the hairline without cutting the hair. Use sharp scissors, make many small cuts to cut down the risk of cutting unevenly or jaggedly. The side areas, leave about 1/4" of extra lace if possible.

Once this is done, if you want to put the latex on the underside of the wig, this will help glue down the loose lace as well as make it grip your head slightly better, simply take a small amount on the top of your finger and lightly rub it into the first few inch or so of lace under the wig, preferably around where you sewed it. Once this has dried you can then cut away the excess lace under the wig past that, if desired.


Now, you simply need to glue the wig down when you're ready to wear it. There's plenty of info around on how to wear lace wigs so I'll just lightly touch on the subject.

Spirit gum can be used for a short term purpose, or a special lace front adhesive (there are types of glue as well as tape) can be used if the wig will be worn for extended time or under lots of movement. Either has their own type of removal solution which is definitely recommended. Simply put the wig on your head, roll the edge of the lace up and back, and spread a small amount of glue just ahead of your natural hairline following any directions needed (spirit gum for instance, requires a slight touching to become tacky, some glues require heat or time to set), and then press the lace down onto the tacky glue and hold gently in place until bonded. That's that! There are some products out there to protect your skin and hair from the adhesive if needed.

Kittan Bachika (Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann)

Ok, finally time for an actual making-of costume (or in this case wig) post, instead of just me going on and on about how I do things. That was the point of this blog, you know? I do enjoy to talk, so I hope I'm at least being helpful and not annoying.

Anyway, Kittan. Had a friend ask me to cosplay with her about 2 weeks before Nekocon, decided to do the first version of Kittan since I knew I could throw it together relatively easily in little time. Plus, I've always wanted to try making his hair as a wig.

So first off, I've discovered something useful when trying to make short boy wigs, especially spiky or "up" ones, within reason, using natural-style wigs instead of costume wigs meant for the purpose.

Curly wigs. No really. First, because a lot of the wigs that are meant for cosmetic purposes tend to be made a bit better, and I can manage to find them cheaply at a lot of local wig stores because they're so common. The wig I started off with I got for around $5 because they were getting rid of a lot of old stock (this particular one is a Paula Young "Heather" which seems to be a discontinued style), but I've gotten them in the $8-10 range quite often. The reason for the curly wigs is that they work better going shorter and up because of how they are made; the wefts tend to be a bit denser and closer together than most short and mid-length wigs, and they have a bit of body at the roots that assists in going up and into spikes. (The easiest way to tell if they will be good for this or not, is if you can see the wig in person, you can slightly separate the hair with your fingers and see how close together the wefts are at the roots, there are some out there that are really sparse that just make up for it with extreme poof.) Of course, you have to straighten them first. I discovered this phenomenon when I bought a light blue afro wig out of desperation in the hopes I could straighten it [link] and it totally worked. It's relatively easy, gently comb the wig out, then patiently steam it straight. It doesn't take too long, but you definitely can't rush it. It also helps to clip up the wig in sections and straighten it in parts, especially if it's an extremely poofy wig, and it also helps if you're going to spike it up to not straighten it all the way to the roots at the top of thew wig, leave the last 1/2" or so slightly wavy.


Anyway, so I started with this:




Brushed it out, sectioned out the part that would be Kittan's glorious rooster-hair (basically the whole crown) and began steaming the rest down:


I then carefully cut the wig with a razor and scissors, checking periodically to make sure I wasn't making it too thin, a good rule of thumb is that you want the hair you are cutting to be a few inches past the top of the next row below it and then carefully work shorter from that in tiny amounts testing it on your head periodically. Unfortunately, no pictures of this as I managed to misplace my camera and didn't have time to wait to continue working on it once I found the camera.

Then, time to color. Decided to make wig dye with an even amount of black ink and sepia ink to give it a bit of warmth, ended up having to go a bit darker than I intended as I wanted a good even color. Used my airbrush since I wanted the control of being able to get into precise areas (like at the base of the hair) as needed. Decided I didn't like the ash blonde for the remaining part as Kittan's hair is very bright, mixed up a batch of wig dye with a bit of golden yellow and canary yellow and sprayed just a bit on, just enough to give it a yellowy tint. Ended up looking like this:





Let it sit overnight, and then rinsed the wig in cold water, fortunately not much dye came off as it seems like when using the airbrush you don't have much excess dye. Since the wig felt a bit rough, (dying with ink will often make the fiber feel just a little bit squeaky, especially when you go from light to dark, I assume because of ink build-up), I combed and rinsed it in conditioner it which brought it back to feeling normal.

Finally, chopped into the crest of hair a bit with a razor and scissors to make it a bit more choppy and not just look like a plume of bed-head, and then added some hairspray and hair glue.



Now, if only I had a single picture of me in the costume, heh. There were a few things I would fix on the costume itself next time around, but overall it turned out ok.