it's best to do the arda ones where you just stick the bun on... bc wefts are only sewn in one way and it's hard to get the wig to cooperate completely without taking out and re-stitching some of them
Depending on the color, I also really like shopping at the local wig stores in my area. We have a pretty large afro and latinx population so the local stores carry really great stuff.
It varies a LOT? But being able to put your hands on something in person is really nice and the quality for the price on their synthetics blows anything I've bought online out of the water.
Again though - selection varies. I've often done okay looking for blacks and browns. Other natural colors are hit or miss. Non-natural can be awesome or a bummer.
My red wig for styling Anna from Frozen's Coronation was amazing, and I could get perfect matching wefts and weave pieces right there that looked way more bang on than the just too red or orange I found online.
The synthetic could be styled with a heat tool and it didn't have that bizarre sheen to it? So it looked SO NATURAL compared to a lot of red or orange synthetic wigs. And the price was niiiice. But. Again. Sometimes you won't have that luck. I had to source my friend's Elsa wig (and like ten
thousand wefts) online to get that perfect white and find a non-shiney quality looking matte white we could volumize and style out. Nothing in stores would've cut it.
(I've helped source a Gwen from Torchwood, Elizabeth from Bioshock, Rose from Doctor Who and Peggy Carter wig in stores though, if that helps kind of show where and when I did well.)
(Rose was a very lucky find though, pricier than the others, and you could say "took multiple visits" since I wasn't looking for her actively at the time.)
Meanwhile in the same vein of incredible red hair, I got a gorgeous red wig online for Amy Pond several years back that I love too. It wasn't Arda though because my friend and I were both doing Amy and it
was when everyone who did Amy from Arda felt they photographed too orange. I wish I could recall because it was a retired woman who did costuming and now did wig supply online and loved supporting the cosplay community and drag community
and was the nicest woman from down south. I'll have to see if I can find her sits and I'll drop it back in here. I haven't bought any wigs online since Amy's other than Elsa's which came down to insane amounts of research and knowing she didn't have the weft/weave pieces on-demand in time.
Hit me up with a PP and let me know what you're cosplaying and I'm happy to help too, if your bun isn't the shape of Arda's. (Which is why I didn't use them for Anna. When you do costuming as long as I have and with professional ballet companies years before cosplay, we always had
tricks for our short haired ballerinas when we couldn't clip something in and I use that now a lot for buns that aren't plain old donut shapes to get more accurate wig styles for costumes.
And that was a lot of TL;DR but it's worth it to pass on good insider info on how you can get yourself a $27.00 wig of incredible quality that you can put your hands on. A lot of our theatre companies go this route too because the quality is so high you can get a real hair wig for your lead and pay half of what you would online.
Oh! And a tip about the wig stores like I frequent. A lot of times you'll see one style on the model head and a tag with a numer-letter combo hanging off. That's the color name. Most times they have that style in the majority of colors the brand sells in the back. So if
showed it with brown roots fading to blonde, or maybe some funky all over electric red? You can look up the brand to see what their color range is or just ask the store owner what other colors that wig comes in and say you're
looking for a deep chestnut or a platinum or if you know the standard number-letter code then rattle that off (I know some of them by memory. Others if it's a common
color I can tell the shopkeep because there's usually wefts, extensions, etc for sale in the basic shades and the corners of the package have the number-letter codes so I can just get it off those and apply it to the wig I'm scouting.)
Depending on where you shop, sometimes you'll have amazing help and sometimes you'll still have great help but there might be a language barrier. Here, some of our stores are afro owned (sadly I've not met any latinx owned) but most are Asian owned
and they're always super kind but I think either used to people who know what they want (the longer I've patronized the stores and gotten better with the wig stock scheme I seem to get better results!) so either they're used to folks being more knowledgeable
than I was in the late aughts or just in general the language barrier is tough. They're great and will still help but it's something to be prepared for since it was definitely a learning curve for me to feel less overwhelmed in the one store I felt I had the best selection in town
Pittsburgh might have a different spread of business ownership than here though, so it might be a very different experience. We didn't even get the afro gals (I think a few are American but a couple are definitely Carribean) opening their
competing store until much more recently. This is down in Annapolis. I've yet to hit up the stores in Baltimore since I'm usually working on stuff in my house there that's got all my cosplay supplies, as opposed to the other house the three of us have in Baltimore.
One day I won't last minute and keep to comfort zones and I'll actually explore all the other wig stores around the region because as much of a mecca as the two in Annapolis make (there's a third but it's rubbish) I'd love to discover another hidden wonderland!
There's all KINDS of amazing styling tools I've gotten from the store too and usually marked for between $2-5. Foam wrapped wire for armature in complex hair pieces. Curlers of every design. Hair products and a toooon for my naturally kinky hair which I love. Faux eyelashes. Appliques. I mean.
I literally can't put into words just how much these places help me flesh out my Caboodle toolkit in general, much less specific needs for wigs and cosplays too.
And I was looking at like... clip in buns too but my hair is a: hard to match because my stylist custom mixes my red and also b: changes enough that it wouldn't necessarily match next month if it did his month
A lot of times if it's a complicated hair style (IE Merida's), I look at a lot of other cosplayers or even official costumes done like Disney etc to figure out what I liked and didn't like about all of them.
I don't know if Scholastic ever sponsored appearances at book fairs or anything by folks costuming as her or if Lily Tomlin ever donned a costume for kicks but.
Even if not you can scope out other cosplayers and then narrow down your top three or so to figure out what you like in real life as a way of getting a solid "okay this is what I want to shoot for."
Also FYI, make sure you find out what Arda is recommending for order lead times. They always get rushes around big cons and Halloween so if you do choose them you want to make sure they can actually get it to you in time.
not even a group project. there were no prereqs for this class and it was a "history" style course. new instructor is running it as a hard CS course and they don't teach EE's any real programing so I am woefully unprepared
Also allows you to scope out some local businesses too and see if you like they have. Natural curl with solid front hairlines is easy to find their because a lot of women like that style in their wigs. Most of the manufacturers only make a couple ginger colors but they're really suitable for Frizzle I would say (the main shade is what I bought for Anna)
we learn "programming" freshmen year which is just like "this is a loop" and then unless you take a CS minor you never really see anything but Matlab ever again
I mean I can Matlab like a boss. but this class was just like "surprise you have to write a socket level call to weather underground's API and get the forcast. also parse the XML"
Yeah even our community college (it's a top rated in the country to be fair) EE 2 year degree makes you take a C programming class. Just one but they make you do it.
To be fair I don't know if JAVA is an option there because I looked at it solely to fill in my pre-reqs my first degree didn't give me and NASA didn't need me to have JAVA. Not to mention I already... Knew what I was doing since I was an engineer in name just not in degree.
but yeah dude can't even tell us what to do on a windows machine because he only uses Linux. which is fine but you can't get into the Linux lab unless you have a class in there so it's become a whole thing
Will he let you work on your own machine if you load Linux on it? Maybe that would help and you can just swap into Linux when you boot and skip fucking with the stupid campus lab??
engineering school doesn't accept any pass/fail. it's way past add/drop but I couldn't drop it anyway because it's the last class I need for my concentration and no other classes that would satisfy that were offered this semester
(I'd also report the Linux lab limitation when you get a chance afterward if you're up to it because that's super not helpful and might benefit the next kid who's way less chill than you.)
he is having us work on our own machines but the Linux on Windows 10 thing that's available now is taking literally 12 hours to run get update for some reason
Rather than run Linux through Windows 10 can you put it on directly? And load from the boot screen? (Although I guess if you didn't partition your hard drive that would mean reinstalling Windows and probably a huge headache)
We can't do pass fail either unless it's some bullshit elective but I didn't know if you could squeeze by since this is source an elective. I figured not, hence my comment. Bleh.
just because I had my surface on me when I tried to start this project yesterday because it is my primary machine right now. my laptop struggles sometimes
When I first started college, I had an E Machine with with Windows 95, 128mb ram, and a 2gig hard drive. It could miraculously run one webpage and AOL Instant messenger at the same time.
It wasn't even as long as two DVD drives. And as you can see, a scant bit wider than one. I carried that into LAN parties in its little box with a handle and summarily broke everyone. Then broke them again when I slaughtered them at Counterstrike.
Luckily my girlfriend put a note on my monitor saying she was taking a nap so when the guy tore it off and left it on the ground it put his fingerprints in the house. He went to jail. And summarily dodged parole eight years later and never paid me back.
But I got a but of justice I guess. Some day Im going to buy that stupid fucking case, gut it as a shell, and put a new computer inside it. I had it for six months.
After that I just used my girlfriend's old white Apple laptop for several years heh. So you can see why I'm like. Wait. What? Two mobile devices??? Confusion abounds!
nah I dropped a friend of mine off at home when we came back from Nebraska and it turned out her apartment had been broken into while we were gone. they took her jar of change too
That asshole sold it for $50 after the pawn shop said no (and alerted the police) to "some Mexicans in a van" (asshole racist). But more importantly. FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS?! It cost me over a grand and you couldn't get at least a hundred you shit Lord?
Caboodletoolkit in general, much less specific needs for wigs and cosplays too.dont talk to me about coding right now I'm about to kill someone in my computer networks class over this projectuggggghhhhh group coding projects-not even a group project. there were no prereqs for this class and it was a "history" style course. new instructor is running it as a hard CS course and they don't teach EE's any real programing so I am woefully unpreparedi'm not sitting in this class right now or anythinghaha as in you're playing hooky??nope. sitting here taking notes