Best Way to Reroot a Doll's Hair with Acrylic Yarn

There are a zillion videos on youtube out there talking about how to reroot, so I'm not going to go into too much detail on that specifically. I'm just going to show you the way I discovered to root yarn to where it isn't too bulky.

The first time I tried to reroot with yarn, I processed the yarn ahead of time, and when I took out sections to root it, it wouldn't hold. Even pulling it apart to notch it into the needle caused it to break.

Next, I rerooted using full yarn strings. As you can see on the left, it came out really fluffy, even though I didn't plug every single hole. And this was actually my second attempt where I plugged even fewer holes than the first time. I also brushed furiously and cut away hair to thin it out, but nothing worked.

While volume isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you're going for realism, this is a bit much.

As someone who had always taken the extra step of unraveling the yarn before brushing it out, I thought "why not just root these smaller pieces"? And that's pretty much it. It doesn't get too poofy. You still may not want to root every hole on the top of the head, but you're good to go to root the entire perimeter with yarn like that.

If you're going to do this, processes the yarn in sections so you can get it flat enough. So in other words, brush out and straighten se

I'll give you some pictures as a step-by-step just in case you don't know what I'm talking about or if you've never worked with yarn. It's easy!

Step one: Prep the Head

Step Two: Prep Your Yarn

All I did here was to tie some yarn to a stick and then untwist each piece.

Step Three: Root the Hair in

Pretty self-explanatory. Bend each piece in half over the rooting needle and stick it into the doll's head.

You can make your own rooting needles by cutting the loop of a needle on a slant with some wire cutters. I use size 8 embroidery needles because they tend to be stronger than normal needles and the loops are longer.

Below is what it looks like brushed out with a cat brush and straightened with a hair straightener. But if you're rooting, you'll want to process the hair after you've inserted it into the head. Hot tip, if you don't want to reroot the whole head: glue wefts in the back of the head. This is good for when you have a static hairstyle or if your character is going to be wearing a hat like mine is.

Step Four: Bask in the Result of Your Work

Rerooting with Acrylic is certainly time-consuming, but it gets you the best results. And if you put a movie on, the work isn't even a pain to do. Plus, Acrylic is always going to be soooo much cheaper than saran or nylon. I highly recommend it.

Love,

Haley

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