6/15/07
Okay. Hair. The only way I could think of to approach the hair was to think of it as part of a giant plushie. I used soft brown suede, batting, and cotton stuffing.
Here is the outside of the hair, unpadded. I then cut another piece of suede that was only a copy of the bottom third of the outside piece. These two pieces were sewn together along the bottom and put aside.
Then I had to make the "ear" vents, for the fans. I cut round holes through the skin, foam, and plastic canvas where I knew they would lie underneath the finished hair. Then I glued pieces of plastic canvas that had identical holes cut in them, with heavy-duty Velcro on the sides, and pieces of screen painted with thinned peach acrylic (I found that the fans didn't blow well through plastic canvas, but worked fine with screen). This is a shot of the inside of the head.
So this is what it looked like on the outside, with the fabric tucked in. I knew that I had to have a way to hold the hair piece away from the vent so air could even get inside, so...
I took scraps of brown suede and batting and made "snakes" out of them and hotglued them in semicircles around the sides of the vent, towards the back of the head.
With the hair in place, this is how it would lie over the vent. Yes, you can see the vent if you're close enough. I so don't care. The fans work great and might if I'm lucky keep me from dying in the San Diego July heat. (*Might*, I repeat.) Anyways I glued the other sides of the Velcro to the plastic canvas pieces with the fans on them; these can be placed inside the head and switched on when needed.
So anyways, I stitched some batting into the hair to give it shape, then glued it onto the head (keeping an opening at the top) and pushed in some stuffing to round it out. Then I made some more, thinner "snakes" out of suede and batting and stitched them in place at the top of the head as I closed the opening, making the two errant hairs. Then I used squeezie black fabric paint to outline the eyes and mouth, and glued on some black Fun Foam eyebrows. (This picture was taken before the hairs, paint, and eyebrows.) And...that was it.