Trim a round face and head | Mabel The Whoodle

Hi guys, welcome to today's video. It is much anticipated we are going to be talking about faces. You can see Mabel is in a pretty traditional woodle face. We've got like a big round head, some short round ears, and then her muzzle is very very round also. I'm going to be going over all of that in today's video. We hope you guys like it. Don't forget to give your dog some love during the grooming session. We want to make sure that it's a positive experience, lots of treats, lots of love, lots of breaks. Yes, really good. Okay, for today's tools you're going to need a pair of clippers, a set of attachment combs, a wide tooth comb, a brush, and a set of scissors. These are the Andes clippers that I like to use and I'm kind of showing you here a 10 blade goes underneath these attachment combs. I do have another video where I go into more depth about attachment combs and how they slide onto the clipper like that and what the different lengths use. You can check that out if you want to. First step we're going to do is we are going to brush and comb the head, the face, and the ears really well so that we can make sure to get that attachment comb through there. I always find that her around her muzzle is the most matted up. So I'm doing line brushing here and that's just where I pull the hair in the opposite direction and then brush down in the direction that it grows and this is so that I can have a nice look at the skin underneath and see any mats that may have formed there. As always, you want to make sure that you're giving your dog lots of treats and breaks if they need it. You always want grooming to be a positive experience. You want them to absolutely love it. If your dog doesn't like grooming or doesn't like being brushed, you're just going to want to make sure to make these shorter. So you're going to brush for five seconds, give a bunch of yummy cookies, brush for another five seconds, give a bunch of yummy cookies. I do have a video on face holds, how to hold your dog's face for trimming and brushing and scissoring and that's a great one to check out if you're having problems with dog's behavior during it. And you can see she's got her foot up there. She's saying, I don't want to do this anymore and I just kind of keep hanging on and let her go through it and then make sure to give her lots of cookies after. Okay, so we are doing the top of the head. I've got the A attachment comb on there and you kind of start in the middle of the head and you're going to go in a circle basically just like a clock. You're going to go down on the sides and then around the bed and then you can run the clippers like I'm showing you and you can also run them in reverse from the back of the head towards the front. And I like to go down the sides of the face with the clippers also. That is something that you could hand scissor for an even rounder look. I find that Mabel gets matted underneath her ears very easily and so I just like to take that clipper and run it down the sides of her face behind the eye but in front of the ear and then you can see I'm continuing it down onto the neck as well and behind the ear. I just want all that to be really short. Now I'm going to move to the top of her nose right in front of her eyes. I'm going to take my wide tooth comb and I'm going to brush all of that hair up. I had done another video where I trimmed really close in front of her eyes so right between her nose is already pretty short but you can see I am just combing that back and then I am taking the scissors and I am going to a point in the middle of her eyes and as usual you just want to take your time and go really slow and I just trim anything that's sticking out weird. Now we're going to do the bangs. Go slow and be cautious when you do this because if you go too short they can look really weird but you kind of brush the front section of her head forward. You can kind of see we've got that round look and we're just going to trim that straight across but again don't go all the way back. You can see I'm like an inch out from the eyeballs that way that she still has a short bang so you can see her eyes but it's not super crazy short when she goes to look up. You don't want a ridge between her fangs and the floof on her head and so you will want to repeat that process a couple of times of combing forward and scissoring just to get all the weird sticky-outies. You're going Now I'm going to do the top of her head and so I'm going to use the comb. I'm going to comb that hair on the top of her head straight up and then you're going to do a kind of a rainbow shape for lack of a better term and these scissors that I'm using in this video, this one in particular, are from the big box pet store. They work good. They're not anything super fancy but they do the job and you just keep doing that. You can see on the back part of the head I've still got weird hairs sticking up and so you would take those scissors comb up and keep trimming that round shape until you get a round head that you like the look of. Now I'm kind of showing you the side of the face. This is with a better pair of shears. These are my professional shears but you don't have to have those in order to do this work. You can use the ones from the big box store and so same thing here guys. I am just combing outward and I'm going to trim anything that's extra long that those metal attachment combs didn't get. Now I'm going to do the bottom of her chin, her beard, and so I'm going to comb all of the hair forward first and then I'm trimming in a round shape. I'm right-handed so I'm holding her face mostly with my left hand and combing and scissoring with the right. It's just combing the beard back towards her neck and trimming weird stuff and then it's combing it forward and trimming weird stuff. This is kind of what grooming is. You just keep combing and scissoring until you like the final look whenever you step back and take a look. Oodles, woodles, doodles all kind of have this same mustachio look. You kind of comb that beard straight down and then use your scissors to make a curved line. Now I'm doing the mustache part after the beard part because that will determine how long the mustache will be. I like a really short chin. If you like something longer you'll want to leave your chin longer and then whenever you trim your mustache it will be the same length as your beard. And this too guys, I'm just brushing it back and forth to get anything weird sticking out that I don't like the look of. You're probably tired of hearing me say that but that is what grooming is. Just a lot of combing and brushing until you like the look of what it looks like. I'm doing a recheck of just kind of everything. I'm rechecking the bangs. I'm rechecking the top of the head. See if I want anything to be a little bit shorter or a little bit rounder. Just looking at that overall look of how her face is looking. When you put your dog on the floor from the raised surface, right, I like a table or a countertop to groom dogs on. But as soon as you put them on the floor the very first thing they're going to do is either shake or take a couple walks and then shake. Like a couple steps. As soon as they shake you'll look at their head and their face and things might be sticking out that you didn't notice before while you were doing all this combing back and forth. And so you may have to put them right back up on the table and do a couple more comb throughs and a couple scissors. That's completely normal. I kept this video in here because you know I know that it's something that I just showed you guys but you can see she's having an off day so to speak. She's really putting her paws up on me um on my arm and she's like oh I would rather be playing can't we do something else. And you can see I am gently encouraging her. I don't have my voice on here but I am saying it's okay and you're a good girl and those kind of things because I know that she can power through this. I know that she can make it but I wanted you guys to see that you know she's not perfect and she has off days and puts her feet up on me and stuff like that too. And it's perfectly okay to keep holding on to the chin as long as they are not throwing a total fit. You know the little paw up the little head jiggle that is perfectly okay. But if she was really throwing a tantrum it's time to take a break. It's time to you know go outside play a few minutes and then come back in and try to finish up your grooming. Let's trim some ears. So I comb the ear completely out and then I hold it nice and flat. Now the scissors that I'm using right here are called thinning shears and they have teeth on them so that they kind of trim every other hair. I like to use these on ears and around eyes also because it gives a nice natural look and I'm just going in a round shape. Then I put her head up the way that she would look if she was looking at me. I comb back through and I see stuff that's you know sticking out and I go ahead and re-trim that. If you were using a regular set of scissors rather than the thinning shears you would just cut a nice round shape or you could do straight across. Either one is fine. It's just kind of which look you like better. And now I just spin it over to the right ear. I've combed it completely out. I'm kind of holding that ear nice and flat and then I'm hitting it over and over again with those thinning shears to trim like a good inch, inch and a half off the bottom of her ears. I was always nervous about trimming her ears. This was the first time that I'd done it because I didn't want to lose that dark hair and I really hope that I don't. I'll do one last comb through and take a look and I just think she looks super cute. She has some things that I'm going to trim up just a little bit more but overall I'm really digging these short ears. And here is her before and then of course her after. She looks way, way better. Let me know if you guys have any questions in the comments and I will get back to you. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time. Yes, you're gonna say bye? I just want that cookie. I want that other cookie, please.