Wigs Soft Wig Caps vs Hard for a Total Newbie

I have been making my own doll wigs for a quite a while now. I have made soft-capped-wigs in the past (more than fifteen(?) years now) and more recently-ish (ten or so years), I've made quite a lot of hard cap ones. I would say it is a matter of personal preference, and also patience. You need the latter for both, but soft-capped wigs definitely require a lot more of it, if you're planning on learning how to make both the caps and the hair-wefts, as sewn wefts can be a pain in the gut-hole to get right, more so if you're making them for tinier headed dolls, that are actually small dolls and not 40cm + dolls. Gluing is easy, getting it to look pretty, clean and neat is not. You have to have patience for learning how to make hard-cap wigs, but it is a lot easier than making sewn wefts, at least in my very own personal experience, and for my own personal preference in hair-bulk (which is leaning toward realistic, kind of common human-like hair bulk, and not fashion doll, top-heavy-hyper-rooted/thick-wefted, and wig-looking "wigs").

My personal preference for fiber is synthetic, because I find a lot of newer synthetic fibers are thinner which work well for a variety of doll-head-sizes. They don't look too thick on smaller headed dolls (which is my personal preference in doll sizes), but still look good on larger melon headed dolls as well. There are some tutorials on here about making hard cap wigs, I don't know that there are any that still have photos for sewn-soft-cap wigs, but you do need a patter for making your own soft caps. You might find some tutorials for that somewhere on here, that are still at least visible (maybe even archived at this point). I would prefer soft cap wigs, if making the wefts wasn't a pain in the gut hole. Readymade sewn wefts are too thickly made for my preference, otherwise I would pick soft-capped wigs all the time for my own wig making. Having said that, hard cap wigs are easy to make a young child could literally make them -- it just takes a lot of patience and practice to get anything made to look nice, and not like crap. Don't be discouraged if your first wigs don't look anything like what you were aiming for. It takes time and patience to get good at anything, even gluing hair takes a bit of time to get right.

Definitely look for tutorials on here, to see which style of wigs would suit your needs better! Hope that helps and good luck! (:

 

Hard cap wigs are really good for tiny, tiny dolls. It's a lot easier to make them proportionally thick. It's really just a matter of practicing the gluing. They also have the advantage/disadvantage of fitting the doll they're made for so well that you don't need anything else to keep them on. But that can make them difficult or impossible to use on another doll.

You can buy soft wig caps if you don't feel up to making them and buy the wefts, but I'll second Enzyme in that the premade wefts are thick. I did a soft cap a while back with premade wefts that was super poofy. Some wefts are two layers and you can separate them, but that's usually the mohair ones.

 

I agree with Enzyme that it's a matter of preference, and also doll size. They both have different learning curves, so it really depends on what suits your needs more. Hard caps are better generally speaking if you want a very short style, like many men's haircuts. (Sewn wigs don't tend to work as well for that.) I have made many wigs myself, but almost all for 3-4" heads where sewn wigs simply do not work most of the time. Sewn wigs have the advantage of not needing to be so size-specific, so you can trade them more easily between dolls if you want to.

 

I actually use yarn to make soft caps. If you can do basic crochet, try this tutorial (scroll down) and sew wefts to the cap.