No more bad hair days

I´ve been intrigued by the intricate braided hairdo's of German 15th century for a while and was happy when I discovered that they weren´t just the artist´s interpretation of an ideal, but that they most likely were fakes. Zopfe, or false braids, seems to be high fashion for the younger women and those of higher class. The higher society, the bigger the braids. Here are some examples of what must be fake hair:

More is more in Nüremberg, for sure, according to Albrecht Dürer.

In this one the real hair definetly differs in colour from the zopfe.

This is an earlier painting and the zopfe aren´t that exaggerated.

Here a version with inserted red, matching the gefrens beatifully.

There even is some extant examples of fake braids from the German area, made of stuffed cloth-rolls:

I have tried the filling out your own hair before, see here:http://renikasanachronisticadventures.blogspot.se/2013/05/fake-it-til-you-make-it.html

Now I wanted to go all in, and make me a full set of fake hair and browsing through a number of paintings I found that they really do not need to look natural. I did however not wish it to differ to much from my own hair, and luckily I had some scraps of a simple but beautiful reddish brown wool that was just enough to make three long tubes. I decided to fill them with more scrap fabric and in order to shape them nicely around the head, I made them thicker in the middle and thinner in the ends. I simply rolled them together and pinned it all and then sew them along the fold before braiding them.

I hade taken a rough measurement of my head beforehand, but had to shorten them a bit before sewing the ends together, trying my best to make them fit together nicely in the braid pattern.

Since the real hair is not shown other than over the temples and on the top of the head, I figured that it most likely was praided and either hidden under the Zopfe or, in some cases, in a hairnet covering the head under the Zopfe. This is how it looks on me with my own hair simply tucked in under the Zopfe. 

Now I need to finish the new gefrens and try it all out together.