Hey, guys today I would like to revisit the topic of Italian renaissance hair taping. I did an article about this 10 years ago. I think it has been now which is a long time and it is one of my favorite ways way studio hair I guess favorite historical hairstyles because it's so easy to do and so impactful I feel like this looks really impressive it looks very beautiful. So when I think Italian renaissance it is very closely tied to super elaborate richly decorated hairstyles the Italians in the 15th and 16th century were on top of their game. When it came to hair styling the paintings from that period feature ladies with the most amazing looking hairstyles um very much to my personal taste.
I must admit that's why I probably like them so much but tying the hair up using ribbons or thin scarves was a very popular way of dressing the hair and is featured in so many different paintings and drawings and sources and usually what you get is a twist of hair so a rope braid or a regular braid or just the hair itself bound together sewn onto the head using a ribbon or again a thin scarf there are countless ways you can do this countless variation. But I'm going to show you a pretty simple design today for a quite basic Italian hair taping hairstyle it should come out looking something like this so let's get started straight away most commonly the hair would have been worn in a center parting.
So I'm gonna do mine in a center parting as well and I'm gonna have to deal with my bangs shouldn't be too big of a problem I am wearing some hair extensions to fill out my braids. I need a little bit more length and thickness to get the effect that I want to achieve with this just letting you know that you don't need them. If your own hair is about mid-length then you should be absolutely fine you need to have long enough hair to be able to wrap it around your head but once you have that then you're all good.
So I have split my hair down the center and literally, just split it I don't have a parting down the back there are some images where you can see the women with partings in the back. I just personally prefer the look with no parting also because I'm wearing extensions I can't really do a parting because my wefts would show but I also just prefer that look so what I'm going to do is in the front of my hair where I'm going to start on one side and I'm going to start twisting the hair back and as I'm doing that I'm just going to very quickly slide in a pin here to hold down those bangs. I'm gonna keep twisting twisting twisting all the way back. When I make my way down I'm gonna make sure that the hair I have in this hand is about half of both the hair on this site so that should be around here.
I'm just going to continue twisting this strand a little bit further down because I'm going to be making a rope braid with this eventually. So I'm going to take the other half of the hair twist that in the same direction. That I have been twisting it all the time and then I'm going to twist these two around each other in the opposite direction. So I have been twisting away from my face which means that I'm gonna twist these two towards my face. So I'm gonna keep twisting the individual strands away from my face and then twisting them around each other towards my face and that's gonna create a little rope braid for me here okay.
When I come to the end of my braid I'm gonna tie it off with a hair elastic obviously this isn't historically correct back in the renaissance this could have been tied with a piece of string um or not at all most likely it was just pinned. I'm going to make this braid a little bit looser because I don't want it to be this tight it needs to look a bit more fluffy okay. I'm going to do the same thing on the other side, I am just going to go back and enforce this twist that I have a little bit because I can already see it slipping I didn't bother curling my hair so that's probably why this isn't holding too well if your hair is a bit coarser than mine or has maybe a little bit more texture then this shouldn't be a problem but if it is you can always just add more bobby pins. So I have my two braids now I have my front twists. So now I'm going to cross my braids in the back like that and bring them forward to the top of my head I think I'm going to do them a bit more to the back and then where I want them to end or where they actually, do I'm going to take a little claw clip and just clip this let me turn around so you can see what's going on here next step is to actually sew or tape down.
This hair so for that you're going to need a long piece of good ribbon I think I did about one and a half times my arms pan it needs to be long enough to sew the braid and then wrap around one more time. It's better to leave your ribbon a bit longer than to make it too short and you will also need a blunt needle I use um just the one that I use for my knitting and crochet it has a nice big opening and a blunt tip and this one's nice and flexible as well you definitely don't want to do this with a sharp meal by the way. Because you run the risk of hurting yourself damaging your scalp we don't want any of that so I'm gonna take this and let me just turn around for this the portion here I am going to run a needle underneath my braids here and I'm going to leave a long enough tail.
So that I can tie this off into a bow on the at the end but from now on I am basically just going to whip stitch this in place. So I'm gonna go around my braids you want to catch both braids in every stitch. I'm making sure to really go over my scalp with the needle to make sure that I'm actually sewing these braids onto something and not just you know wrapping ribbon around them. Because that wouldn't actually help them hold now if you're doing this by yourself on your own hair um it is definitely possible but in that case, I would advise you to stand in front of a standing mirror and have a second handheld mirror near you.
So that you can check what you're doing from the back regularly to make sure that the ribbon is laced through at regular intervals. So I'm not like what I'm doing right now but at this point. I can see from the front what I'm doing pretty well you also want to make sure. When you are threading your ribbon that it isn't folded. When you come to the front center you're gonna have a little bit of tail probably peeking out so just tuck that underneath the other braid to hide it. I'm gonna take out my claw clip now I'm gonna keep holding this with my hands. While I stitch over it and when you have reached the center of the top of your head you're going to want to do a backstitch once so go back to create a little x in the center front just to fortify that bit a little bit because that's where your ends are and that is where it's most prone to slipping out and then you can just continue on the other side okay.
So now I know that my ribbon is way too short because this was supposed to wrap around one more time. So I'm afraid I'm gonna need a longer one so I'm just gonna do all of this again um the extra wrap is very important it features in nearly all the paintings. Where women have their hair like that so I'm just gonna go back and do this again with a little bit of a longer ribbon but basically the hairstyle is done in the end you would just tie these two pieces together into a little bow. So if you want it you could just finish it here and it would look something like this but I'm just gonna redo it real quickly and then I'll come back okay. So with a long enough ribbon, it looks a little something like this. Now I must say guys by far the hardest thing about this is getting your stitches even I had to redo mine three or four times and this is about as good as I can get it.
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