smiley-edgelord asked:

Hi! I'm going to be restoring an old G1 Moondancer and wanted to know how you redid the tails on your ponies!

charmsponies answered:

Oh, sure! I have a tail I actually need to restore Right Now so I might as well make this a mini tutorial to how I retail ponies hehe!

Things you will need: 1) A pony to retail 2) Hair (I buy mine from shimmer locks (not sponsered lol, they just have affordable prices and pretty accurate color matches for pretty much all g1 ponies) 3) zipties (the smaller the better!) 4) Scissors 5) A ruler

And then not pictured because I forgot: you will also need floss and a pair of pliers.

You’ll first wanna figure out how much hair you want to use! If you want it to be accurate to how it originally was you can compare it to another pony of the same type (Like: for this BBE Ribbon I’m comparing the tail length to my BBE Tiddley-winks, who has a tail about 3.5 inches long.) I would love to give an exact measurement for Moondancer here but I don’t have her or any of the unicorns from that set…. I’d guess around 6 inches? But thats just based on what other pony’s tail lengths are idk for sure

When you measure out your hair: it’s important to measure TWICE as long as you need! For example, i need three and a half, so i’m going to double that and measure about 7 inches. I always add an inch or two just for good measure so I can trim it down to exactly how long I want it :3 So I’ll be cutting this at 8 inches

Tie a piece of floss around the center of the tail (you wont need to use All of the hair you cut, just use as much as will fit in the tail hole. You might have to add more or take away more later depending on if its loose or tight trying to get it through the tail hole

You will thread the floss through the tail hole, through the body and out the head like this! and then pull that hair into the tail hole using your pliers (trust me if you use your hands and youre working with a lot of hair or a stubbornly hard body you will hurt yourself it is not pleasant. sometimes this can be a bitch to do, be firm but also not too rough that you pull the Entire tail through)

Once the tail is in, pull it forward enough to where you can insert a ziptie like this to hold the tail together. You can also cut the floss now

You can tighten the ziptie now :3 I always add a second one just underneath it to ensure that it stays put. And you can also trim the zipties too

Now you can pull the tail and its done! Sometimes you might notice the hair parting a bit just because of the zipties inside the pony. I’ve found smaller zipties hide this better, but for me this goes away once i style it so its not really too big an issue. It’s better than her not having a tail at all at least lol. This is where i trim it to the correct length and save the extra hair for future projects.

I hope that this helped!!! I know that there might be other methods but this is the one i use. If you have any questions feel free to reach out! Good luck with moondancer 🥰