Sewing Update: late 18th Century "Hedgehog" Wig

Styling a wig to wear with my recently completed chemise de la reine was one of the many "short projects" that I had on my to do list to get ready for Costume College.  I needed something that would look a bit like this:  

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Marie-Thérèse-Victoire de France, dite Madame Victoire (1787)

Anne Rodbard, Mrs Blackburne, ca. 1787.

Go big or go home, right?  Frizzy fluff-tacular with trailing barrel curls in the back.  Not possessing a significant amount of hair myself, I had to go to a full wig.  I started with the "French Curl" wig from Amphigory, mostly because I already had one on hand that had out-lived it's original purpose.  It was my default generic Victorian-ish thing for a few years and the trailing curls in the back were starting to get a bit mangled from being pinned up into elaborate up-dos.  So, yay for re-using.  

I'm liking this cut/style for a starting point not only because of the curls, but because of the LENGTH of the curls.  On the crown of the head, the hair comprising the curls was only about six inches long.  In the middle, it was ten.  And I didn't measure the trainling ones in the back, but as you can see, they were fairly long.

Here's what I started with.  A little worse for the wear, but still serviceable.

I took a hand full of the nicest-looking of the trailing curls and wrapped them in a plastic bag for safe keeping.
This way, I wouldn't damage them in the back-combing adventures to come.  You can see where the teasing process has started on the left.

Midway through teasing the wig beyond all recognition.  I was seriously giggling my way
through this process, because it felt so awful to abuse the wig in such a fashion.
All I have to say, is thank goodness I never had to do such an atrocity to my own hair.

Opps!  Missed one.  I went over the entire head a couple of times, and any pieces where I could identify an individual curl got teased again.

Once I'd achieved a satisfactory amount of fluff, I needed to manage some width.  So I took the longest pieces of fluffed hair and pinned them back up into wig's foundation with wig pins.

Pinning up sections of teased curls with a wig pin.

Now it's time to see how it looks on my head.

Urh my god, it's so fluffy!  I felt ridiculous.  Seriously, I did this in the middle of the night and it took every ounce
of self-restraint I had not to wake everyone up and show them my ridiculous hair.

Trying it with the hat and that is MUCH better.  I'm going to the leave the trailing curls bagged up
until I get to con.  The less opportunity to mess them up, the better.

All of the tips and instructions I could find on the internet recommended using ridiculous amounts of hairspray at every stage in the styling process.  As I still need to pack this sucker for flying across the country, I'm not going to be able to store it on the wig form and protect it's shape.  (All of the space/wig heads available for such endeavors are already earmarked for the wigs of ridiculousness that goes with the court ensembles for the gala).  Instead, I'm just packing plenty of cheap hair spray and the styling combs and will touch it up when I get to the hotel.  As there's nothing much to be done with the curls hanging down the back, I've left them bagged up as well.

And that's one more thing checked off the to do list.