Making and Replacing Tails

There are two ways to give a custom a tail, one is to use an old tail (see the right) or two, to make a brand new tail. This involves craft hair, or hair from a different source, such as a doll or other toy horse. I don't like taking hair from another doll though because it's a form of cannibalism, and that is bad unless the toy you are taking the hair from is dead anyway (and you weren't the one that killed it ^_^). Anyway I just don't like it, so I use craft hair. The unfortunate thing about craft hair is that all the companies assume that you want curly hair, nobody makes straight hair. The only kind that was straight that I ever found was in a doll specialty shop but it was real human hair made into a wig for real dolls, not at all what I was looking for. There is also the possibility of getting hair from cheap wigs, especially at Halloween, and some people do that, but I haven't tried yet. Therefore, for me, the problem of curly hair arose. If you leave it curly then you don't have to do much to the hair, other than prep it into a tail. If you want it straight, you have to do a bit more work. The way to straighten the hair is by pulling it under a cool iron. I usually have to do it twice to get it as straight as I want it. The only problem with this however, is that the hair is not nearly the same texture as true pony hair. It is much lighter so it doesn't lay as well and not nearly as silky, but it does a OK job. I usually put it in nice braids with pretty ribbons on the bottom, and then you can't really tell the difference, but I have pretty much given up on straight hair.

Anyway, the way to make a tail from craft hair is this: first, find a piece of cardboard, 6.5 inches long if it's straight hair, 9-10 inches long if it's curly. The normal pony's tail is 6 inches, so 6.5 or 10 gives you some breathing room. Then begin to wrap the hair around this piece of cardboard tightly (pulling any curls straight) until one side has hair that is half the thickness of an average tail. Then you can take a clasp from an original tail (a metal cuff that you bend around it to hold the hairs in place) or if you have no cuff, then wrap the hair firmly about 20 times with thread, tying it off several times along the way so that it is nice and tight and wont come off easily or have the washer slip off of it. Once this is firmly tied, cut the hairs about half an inch offset from the opposite of the clasp or tie so that you have even sides in the end (though you can always trim it up). I suggest however that you don't trim it even until its in the pony or else you may end up making it uneven because the washer may make it skewed in how it rests. Only marginally of course, but it would make trimming very frustrating. Now you have a very nice pony's tail, and all you have to do is put on the washer and put it in the pony. If it is possible, it is easiest to just push the washer on from the clasped end. It will probably take some force, but once it is on, the clasp or tie can be situated so that it will be even harder to take it off that way. If you can't put it on this way, then put the washer on the same way you will put the tail into the pony. The final step for giving a pony a new tail is putting it back into her. This applies to both cases whether you are using an original pony tail or one you have made yourself.

There are two ways to re-insert a pony's tail, through the outside or through the inside. You can only insert through the outside if you are not using a washer to hold the pony's tail in. This makes putting the tail in super easy, but it also makes it easy to pull out when brushing and styling. To pull a tail through from the inside is harder to do, because the tail is a bunch of loose hairs. Unless they are bound together, the tail will only partially go through and much of it will bunch up the way hair does when you tease it on the inside of the pony, leaving for a very messy inside and thin tail. What I do instead is wrap the tail up using thread as shown in the picture to the left. I start at the end with the washer and wrap the thread a bit above the washer without tying it off so that the thread can later be removed easily. Then I cross over the washer and go below, wrapping the tail up so that it will all move as one cord instead of many tiny hairs. I then very tightly and closely wrap the bottom and tie it off several times. Another method, which I have been using recently, is to first braid the tail before wrapping, it makes it easier to handle, though a bit harder to pull through since it is wider. Finally, using the same hook that I used to remove the tail, I insert the hook through the tail hole up to the neck hole, and working in the neck area, hook it to a few of the tied off loops of thread at the bottom of the tail. Then I gently pull, so as not to unravel the binding threads, the tail through the tail hole. Once 1/4 of the tail is through the rest will come easily with no worries about bunching unless the tail is cut very unevenly for some reason. Then I just pull the thread off the tail, cutting it if necessary, but being mindful of the new tail I just worked so hard to insert ;) There it is, in a rather large nutshell, how to make and insert a tail for your custom pony :)