Making Wefts

Hey guys, new girl in the forum, been stalking a while, did  a short introduction in the "introduce yourself"-thread.

Anyway, I bought a couple of packs of bulk wawa thermal hair a couple of years ago and after reading this thread a while back I decided to experiment a little and make a weft of it, because I like installing wefts and making clip ons wayyyy more than I like strand-by-strand methods.

Overall I am very pleased with the results, considering it is my first attempt and I used _fishing line_ to weave it on since my only other option because there were no stores open at the time and I'm way too impatient for my own good. I used the instructions from the mhrw site that was linked to from this topic but honestly I'm not sure I properly understood them but nevertheless the results are good. If I tug on one strand of hair it is more likely to break than to fall out of the weave!

I do not own a weaving pole and I didn't feel that I want to buy one either because I'm not interested in doing this proffesionally so... Can you say DYI? An up-side-down stool worked just fine ;) But I think I'm going to borrow my fathers tool shed and make a couple of weaving poles anyway because quite frankly, it was alot of fun weaving the hair and  I was very impressed with the low "shedding level" of the finished thing, but next time I won't be usign fishing line ;)

It might look bulky on the pics but in real life when I compare to wefts that are machine made that I have bought in the past theese are about the same size, just slightly tighter, I think using a thinner line than the fishing line I used will result in an even thinner weft. Also after I took the pics I finished the weft by sewing it (by hand) just to secure it.

I feel however that there's more to be learnt here, like a good starting and ending knot. Also, you experiences weavers, how do you get the "short ends" so neatly on one side of the weft? When I try to do it they occasionally poke out into the front of the weft as well. Teach me oh great ones. ;)














- edited because I accidentally posted the same pic twice.



Edited by Deliana - January 17 2007 at 6:41am

OMG   That is amazing.... I thought I was a serious outta the box thinker when it came to weaves.. But my goodness u got me BEAT by miles 

Great Job

That is amazing! Genius. I hope u don't mind but i posted your link on BHM hair group.  Genius need to be shared i say. I can't wait to try this, tho i do't think my weft will be is pretty as yours. Yours looks better than some 'store bought' wefts i have. Kudos!

Wow, that looks great!!!

Wow, thanks for all the comments and compliments!

Koffe - I don't mind at all. :)

Nursie - I would say that a 5" piece takes me about 20-30 minutes, I bet the speed will increase as my hands get more used to it tho. :)

I'm glad I could inspire someone. :)
I got so inspired by this forum so I'm glad I can spread the joy ;)

Oh and Metalgirl, I'll join along with the choir, would you mind sending me the instructions too? It would be very interesting to read another description than just the one on the mhrw site, my emailaddy is missdeliana at gmail.com

If you wonder why I wrote at instead of @ it's because if I had typed in the entire email addy as it is then I would get tons of spam because the "spam senders" use scripts to search for email adresses typed out on websites and add them to their mailing lists, so I suggest the rest of you write your email addresses like that too, trust me, it helps. :)


Also, I'm been thinking about making my own tutorial on this subject with clear pictures of what is going on, I've never been good at understanding written instructions, I need to see it to properly get it. Anyone interested?

OK girls, I just finished a little video tutorial, the quality isnt' exceptional but I think you can see (and hear) pretty clearly what I am doing.  :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-UTrGx6pso

So far I've just bent the fishingline around back and sequred it into place by sewing, but the next time I do this I'm using either buttonhole thread or weaving thread if I can find any instead of the fishing line, that way I could just slide the  thread onto a needle and just sew the end threads into the weave.

Deliana what a excellent job Funny thing is I have that same stool . So now I want to try it as well. Thanks so much for the you tube tutorial . Ive been looking for a live instructional video for a while now. Thanks so much

I thought I'd share some more tidbits of information that I've allready posted in Sherries hair forum.

I've done a little more experimenting and have found a thread that works excellently. :) It's something called "grizzly extra strong", I suppose it is some kind of upholstery thread. It's all synthetic and as thin as regular sewing thread except it's so strong that using all my strength pulling it on two ends I can't break it.

It has a lot more texture than fishing line of course and this makes it a bit trickier to weave with since there's mroe friction between the hair and the thread, but then again that is probably a good thing for the end results. more friction will probably mean less shedding. :)

However, I think I'll keep to the fishing line for the lower back wefts  because it's alot easier to weave and then use the upholstery thread wefts towards the top of my head because they are a little thinner.

But who knows, maybe the thread will get easier to work with over time with some experience?

Another thing that might be interesting to know is that the hair I'm weaving with is 22" and the finished length of the weft is between 20" and 21" with a beard of somewhere around 1". The little bit of hair that is in the actual weft is a very short length so the length of the finished weft will really depend on what length you leave the beard more than anything else. It's alot easier to work with the weaving with a longer beard, but gradually as I've been experimenting I've left it shorter and shorter as I work it so now it's down to about 1". Before I got the hang of it I let the beards be longer, like maybe  2" or even 3" and then just cut them shorter but now I'ms tarting to get greedy about the hair and try to leave the beard as short as possible as I go instead. ;)


Oh and the idea of using a stool. I dunno where it came from, I'm a hardcore DIY kind of girl and tend to look at things from a "Hmm, what can I use instead"-point-of-view. Hence fishing line and stool. ;)

Jeepgirl, maybe it would help you to look at the diagram on the mhrw website as well? I printed it out and stared at it in trance for about half an hour while getting tangled up in hair and fishing line before I finally got it right. :)