The Big Chop!!!!! (vid at the end)

well, kinda a big chop. i cut my hair!!!! i ended up cutting off about 12 inches of hair!!! yay me!!!! i know i've been talking about doing it for about 2 years now and saying i was gonna do it but it never happened. well, it was just getting so long and heavy. i get a lot of headaches and migraines and i think the weight of my hair was making them worse. and recently, over the past few months, i've been getting all sorts of things in my hair! deodorant, toothpaste, food. when i was eating, i even got the cheese stuffing from a jalapeno popper in my hair! NASTY!!! so i was keeping it pulled back in ponytails all the time, and whats the point of that?

then i got sick with the flu. why is that important, you ask? well, my Dr put me on Tamiflu-

wait. let me take a break here to tell you some of the side effects of this drug: increased risk of self injury, insomnia, delirium, including symptoms such as altered level of consciousness, confusion, abnormal behavior, delusions, hallucinations, agitation, anxiety, nightmares. WHAT?!?!?!?!

well, i was taking this poisonous drug and i had a dream that my hair was killing my. i just KNEW that if i cut it off, i would get better. and i FELT it so vividly on my head. i was obsessed with getting rid of all of my hair! the only thing that stopped my was that my office is two doors down from my bedroom and i was so sick i was bedridden. there was no way i could make if all the way to my office and then back to the bedroom. i was soooooo weak. my fiancee said i was laying half awake in a daze after waking up from this nightmare and i was just chanting "i have to get it off me" over and over. he was a little freaked out to say the least. and i was only on this drug for a day and a half! i only took 3 pills! poison.

anyways, that was on Wednesday, and i was feeling more in my right mind by Friday, but i was still kinda shook by the dream. plus, my hair really was in the way. i couldn't sleep with my hair tam on cause it gave me a headache. so my hair was just loose on the pillow. it was all over the place. and it was getting dry and hard and frizzy from constantly rubbing on the cotton. then i started vomiting and i got vomit in my hair. YUUUUUUCK! but i was still too sick to stand upright in the shower for any period of time and wash it, so i just ended up kinda wiping it off with a wet cloth. so i was still determined to cut it all off.
so i was talking with my sister about it and she was like, "are you SURE you want to cut it all off or is that still the Tamiflu talking? how about we just cut it shorter and see how that feels and look and then, if you want we cam cut it all off or unravel it later." well, it was actually a longer conversation than that (it took a few days for her to convince me, actually! LOL), but that's the gist of it. so i went over to her house the following Monday, my first day out of the house since i had gotten sick besides the trips to the ER and my Dr.'s office, and she cut it!
her inspiration was how Whoopi's hair looks on the View. apparently Whoopi has a newish bob-like hairstyle and my sister had happened to see The View for the first time ever a few days prior and she saw Whoopi's hair and thought of me. see, it was providence! why would my sister randomly decide to watch a daytime talk show when she never has before?! all the stars were aligning to tell me its was time to cut my hair! LOL
it was really easy. she just laid my hair so the hair in front of my ears was draped over my shoulders and the hair behind my ears hung down my back and then she commenced to cutting! she cut straight across one loc at a time. we tried a few slanted cuts, which is suppose to look better and help keep ur hair from unraveling, but i didn't really see a difference and it was quicker to just cut it across. i was still a little weak from the flu and experiencing major dizziness and nausea and i didn't want to sit up too long.
this is getting really long, so i'll just post the vid so y'all can see the new hair!

Tried Palmrolling the Front Again...

wow! its been awhile since i last wrote! i've been sooo busy. i was unemployed for about 4 months (i know i said i found a job in my July post, but that didn't end up working out :-/ but the good thing is this new job i found pays a dollar more! yay!)and i was job searching hard core while still going to school online full time. then i found a job and i started work in September but i had to take additional courses for my job in addition to my full time school and work! my plate was FULL!
but, a lot has been going on in my world in regards to my hair! i'll save the biggest news for my next post, but one big thing is i started palm rolling the front of my hair again. not all the time, just in between latchings. i'm trying not to latch the front as much because i don't want to cause stress on the delicate front hairline. i've never had problems with my hairline before, but i figured it was best to just go easy on it. i don't know why. probably cause i was hearing a lot of people talk about their hairlines recently and it got me thinking about mine. i did a YouTube vid on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc683k-qqY8

you have to go over to Youtube to see the vid, i don't allow embedding anymore, sorry! i was finding my vids posted all over the place! sometimes in places i wouldn't necessarily want them to be...

but then i remember why i hated doing that! a line of dirt in my hair where the loced part ended and the loose hair started! i was sooooo disgusted! i don't know why i get that! i use the tiniest amount of gel! you can see that in the video! and its clear gel! i don't understand it. unless its not the gel and its something else. i don't know! its not on all the locs, just like maybe less then ten. but its a very visible (to me) line if dirt. almost like when you were a kid and you wore a ponytail for too long and then when you took the rubber band out of your hair, there was that line of dirt where it was. i had to use a toothbrush and wet it and scrub the line out. i went back and forth and then up and down. by the time i was through, my hair was a frizzy, puffy mess! but the VISIBLE dirt line was gone. who knows whats going on inside the core of the loc where i can't see.
ugh! there's more i want to say about the palm rolling the front, but i don't want to give away my big surprise i'm gonna put it in a separate post! so i think i'll just end this one here. i know it doesn't really make any difference since the newest post will show up before this post, but humor me, okay! LOL

Tam in Action

Just a quick vid of me wearing one of my tams. I didn't do a drawstring for this one. I love it so much this one is gonna be fo ME! LOL!!

BTW, the other tams and visor are up and available on my Etsy page. Check them out!!

Knitting

i got a job! yay!!! but i'm taking an 8 THOUSAND DOLLAR a year pay cut. the economy is so bad no one is offering any decent salaries! five and a half years ago, with virtually no college coursework and five years less experience, i was hired on at my old job at $14.65 an hour. over the five years i gradually made it up to $15.94. then the economy collapses and my center got closed down and now i'm laid off. everywhere i was looking for a job in the past few months ranges from 12 to 14 an hour!!!! with most of them averaging around $13!! and that all well and good, but i'm now a ten year veteran with much more education under my belt! you'd think i could at least start off at $15! but NO, no place wanted to even consider it. so i finally ended up with this particular company, which was offering the lowest salary ($12 an hour), but it was the place i really really loved the most and had the most room for growth. i'm actually so so exited to go work for this place.
so, now this means i really gotta get up on my game in regards to knitting things to sell. I'm not going to recoup my 8K a year, but if i could even get 2 or 3K, that would be awesome. so i made these three products. i haven't put them up to sell yet cause i want to get really nice pics of everything. i'm probably only gonna ask for like 5 bucks each for these first few things cause i can definitely see areas for improvement. for someone like me, who's an easy going relaxed consumer, minor errors won't bother me. but for someone like my sister, who is very picky and particular, the small errors might make her angry. its not like there are a lot of errors on each piece. it just that each piece has one small stitch error each. one tiny error. it makes me angry, but i do it every time!! arg! so i can't ask for any sort of decent price for these things. i'm basically just trying to make enough back to buy some more yarn.

the first one is a raspberry tam.

the holes aren't too big, so i suppose someone with locs could wear it. there's a little string hanging out from the back. that's the drawstring to tighten the tam so it stays on your head. but its only one string, so its not like you can tie it or something. i suppose one could tuck it under. but i don't know how to advertise and make that lone tightening string a good thing. so that's the error with that piece.

the next one is a larger tam in strawberry lemonade

this one is one of my favorites. but the holes are larger, so i'm not sure how it would work with locs. it would probably work better for someone with an afro, i'm guessing. this one has a nice drawstring woven through the headband. it looks nice, but the error on this one is on one side of the drawstring, the yarn is loose!

you can see it a little bit on the end of the drawstring on the right side. i don't know how this happened! it won't come unraveled, but it doesn't look as neat as it could have! arg!!!

the last one is a knitted visor

i love love love this one. this one has some stitch errors where the visor meets the head piece. needless to say, i almost wept in frustration. and, the visor is a little too narrow for my taste. i would prefer if it was a little bit wider. i'll probably make the next one with a wider visor. and this one is adjustable!! the back closes with a decorative button, but there are five button slots in the back, so it could fit a child's head as well. but i like it a lot. maybe i'll be bold and ask for 6 dollars for this one! LOL!!

that's about it. i start my new job next week so i may not have as much time to knit after that. right now i can make one piece a day. it might slow down to one or two pieces a week when work starts. i'll throw these these three pieces on my Etsy page and see what happens. Maybe no one will want them and i'll end up giving them away as gifts for my family. we'll see...

Simple is Better

I've been working on really cutting down on my hair routine and products. I know I'm a product junkie. And its not just from the few years i wore a relaxer, cause i was using all kinds of products in my natural hair, too. i just like the different effects different products have on my hair. but i'm really starting to realize the less i do to my hair, the better its coming out. so, what i'm doing now is shampooing every two weeks or so with a color depositing shampoo i got from Sally's. literally, the shampoo and conditioner are bright red and it actually deposits color on your hair as you wash. i've only used it once, but i saw results. usually i see color fade-age after each and every wash, but the color looked just as vibrant after i shampooed with this stuff. here's a pic of the shampoo:


of course i bought the matching conditioner. i know i probably need to lay off on the conditioner, but i really like how soft my hair is after i use one, no matter which one. and i'm only washing may hair once or twice a month anyways, so i'm guessing (hoping?) its not that bad.
after i shampoo and condition, i oil my scalp with something. right now i'm using up the last of my original formula JML island oil. after that i'm going to use my doo grow oil. now, the first ingredient in that is mineral oil, which i know is suppose to be the devil for hair, but i've used this stuff for years and years and years. from my natural years, to my relaxed years, to my jherri curl years, back to my relaxed years, and now on my locs. i love the way it smells, i love how nice my hair feels after i use it. i just like it! so i'm going to continue to use it.
then i mist my locs with an conditioning mixture that i've finally settled on and have been using for the past few months. it used to be i would switch up the "formula" every time i made a mixture. but i think i've finally settled on the mix that i like best. so, its a bottle of the extreme shine leave in treatment, some JML cactus leave in conditioner, and a few drops of Africa's Best hair and body oil. here's a pic of that:

this stuff is the SHIT!!!! i did a youtube vid on it. i read out all the ingredients in this oil. its great great great stuff. and i only use a few drops in my mixture! i paid about 3 dollars for this bottle and i've had it about a year and there's still more than 3 quarters left. a great investment!! and after that i mix the spray bottle with water and give it a shake to mix the oils and its good to go. here's my little secret. as the spray bottle get emptier, i just add more water, but not more of the other leave-in's or oil. the mixture is a a yellowish color, so as long s it still has a yellow hue, i know it still has some of the other stuff in it. when it gets really light, which is usually when its almost empty anyways, i just make up a new full strength batch. i do this mostly cause i don't want to put a lot of stuff on my hair when i'm not washing it as often. usually by the time i make a full strength batch, it time to shampoo my hair as well. as time goes on, i don't want to keep putting more stuff on my hair if it hasn't been recently washed, so i water down the mixture. so then it kinda becomes more plain water and less "other" that i'm putting on my hair as time goes on and i get less "build-up" (i put that in quotes cause i don't really have build-up in my hair, but it kinda feels yucky to spay an oily mixture on hair that might not be as clean as it can be)and then by the next time i shampoo, the mixture is uber watered down and i make another full strength bottle. i don't use the mixture every day, more like twice a week. i just try to make sure my hair stays really hydrated cause i tend to have really dry hair anyways and the coloring doesn't help at all. and when it gets really dry it gets crunchy and hard and my hair starts to shed and break off. so, that my simplified regimen. wash, oil the scalp, and spray the locs twice a week. and even though i recently did some hard core coloring, my hair feels as healthy and strong as it ever has. i'm happy with this light weight routine. and i'm glad i've got things figure out as far as what works best for my hair.

in other news, i FINALLY re-latched my hair after like three months! it was getting a little unkempt looking for my tastes. i like a more filled in scalp now, but it was starting to look like a little afro with locs. when i did the brid out, i just finger rolled the roots before i briaded, so it didn't look as puffy and "crazy" as it really was. but after this most recent shampoo, there was just so much loose hair! so, i took the time out and spent over 2 hours latching my head. and i loved the way it looked! my hair hasn't looked this neat in about half a year. like i said, i'm really starting to like a more filled in look now as opposed to the scalpy uniform look i used to favor. but for some reason, on THIS particular latch session, i really likes how nice and neat my hair turned out.

alright. this post is getting long, so i'm gonna end it here! LOL!

I Looked Too Cute...If I do Say So Myself! LOL!

i knit a cocktail hat (actually it was a mistake that i made work!! check out my looming blog for more details and to see a slide show in color) and my sister actually claimed it as soon as she saw it, but i snatched it back to wear to a friends wedding today. i just loved the way my hair looked so much with the little cocktail hat that i just had to snap a few pics...okay, a lot of pic! to save you the hassle of scrolling down, i put it all in a little slide show. enjoy!

Going back to Red

i dyed my hair red again! i was so scared to do it for the longest time because of the warnings i had read about henna and how when you mix it with commercial dyes, it could turn your hair green or black! the sites recommended waiting at least 6 months to a year before you tried regular hair dyes on your hair again, and since i had used the henna last year August, i was gonna wait til then. but then one of my YouTube subscribers and friends made a video and asked me about how i got my hair the color it was, and i made a response vid all about how i originally got my hair colored and how i switched to henna and blah blah blah. ANYWAYS, the point is, another lady commented on how she dyed her hair with henna and the put a commercial dye right over it THE NEXT NIGHT!!!! it blew my mind! and then i got to thinking... the hennaforhair website was warning of your hair turning black or green if you mixed pure BODY GRADE henna with commercial hair dyes. body grade henna is the kind you use to make the temporary tattoo. i doubt the henna i bought from the health food store was body quality henna. so, after reading that, i pretty much decided that i would dye my hair back to red as soon as possible. i just needed my sister's help, cause she's the hair dying queen and my hair has gotten to a length where its a pain in the butt to do it all by myself. we were going to do a YouTube vid of it, but it was too hard to hold the camera and deal with all that red dye. so we just took pic throughout and i made a pic montage about it and posted that to YouTube.


Enjoy.

Oh No! No more Conditioner!

so i did a post a little bit ago about how when i use conditioner, i tend to loose little clumps of hair from any unsealed ends i may have. also, some of the very tips of my locs have weak points. i don't know why, and they were breaking off there. it didn't use to bother me. and i didn't use conditioner all that often. but i went through a period where i sorta neglected my hair and i didn't wash it for a bit and it was dry and dull and feeling like hay. so for the past two months, i've been using a conditioner every time i wash. plus a leave in conditioner. well, my hair is falling apart!!! well, not literally, but those tinly little clumps that i was talking about? well, they multiplied by 10! and i had a lot of puffiness along the shaft of some of my locs. i mean, it got kinda concerning! so i've stopped using the conditioner for now. i wash, oil, and just use my leave in, which right now is a mixture of water, the extreme shine leave in treatment i talked about here, some left over mane and tail leave in i had, and a dallop of the JML cactus leave in. i just washed my hair last night and so far, no hair clumps falling out. we'll see how this goes.

its just such a pain in the butt cause now i'll have all this conditioner but no shampoo! i rarely buy the same shampoo twice. so when i do but a shampoo, i buy the matching conditioner so i can use both together cause i've been told that that's the best way to do it. dr. camille, loc extraordinaire, said that its best to use the matching conditioner cause they've been made to chemically balance each other out and you'll get the best results that way. oh well. my boyfriend shaved his head, so he doesn't use conditioner (or shampoo, for that matter!). they don't expire, right?

Meet the baby!

so i started another loc!!!! its just so cute and tiny! it makes me smile whenever i look at it! basically my loctician who started my hair thought that the two locs at my temples were too tiny for palm rolling and she joined them with nearby locs. but now i latch and i've been having a lot of trouble with the loc on my left temple in particular. the bed where the loc comes from is too wide and the shorter temple hair kept escaping from the loc giving me a frizzy hairline. and if i tried to manhandle that hair back into the loc, it hurt and in the end, it would just pop out later! so after i washed my hair yesterday, i just pulled all that loose hair away from the loc. its was all crinkly and soft. so i gave it a little twirl around my finger and this perfect, tiny, little coil formed immediately! its just so cute! so i decided to leave it. now i have a baby loc at my temple. its going to be smaller than my other ones. and it might not ever get that long. but i love it! maybe even more than the other ones (but don't tell them that!!!! LOL!) here are a few pics of it. i know i took waaaaaayyy more than was necessary! you can't blame me, i'm a proud mama!!!

here she is with my hair down as normal. see her?!


and here are some close ups

Curly Ends

i've heard a lot of people recently voice concerns about their curly ends. well, some people. some people love it and keep their ends unlocked and curly on purpose. its a pretty look. but other people have concerns about it. well, i just wanted to say, relax. i've had locs for 6 years. my hair is grade 4b/4c. so, basically, i have the kinkiest, "nappiest" grade of hair there is...and i still have curly, unlocked ends! not on all my locs, mind you. just about ten to fifteen of them. its really apparent when i use a conditioner in my hair. i have one right in the middle of my head that has a good three inches of unlocked hair at the tip. and most of the ends make little curly-q's. but some are just puffs of hair. i've been twisting them around my fingers to try to get them to at least make a little curly-q, and it seems to be working so far. but my point is, it's perfectly normal.
i also tend to lose little, tiny clumps of hair from these unlocked, unsealed ends. again, more so when i use a conditioner. but that doesn't really worry me either. i know its just the shed hair that was trapped in the loc for so long that's falling out.
but if you're one of the people who is really worried about this and it bothers you, then there is a video on youtube by prettyboishai. she shows you how to use a crochet hook to make the ends of your locs round, and in the process, you tie up those loose curly ends. its a really helpful vid.

Oh Youtube, How I Love Thee!

my company holiday party was yesterday (late january, you ask? yes, we always do it around this time. apparently its cheaper). we go on a three hour cruise around boston harbor on The Spirit of Boston. free food, free drinks, free guest, free parking! anyways, i got out of work at 4:30 and we had to start boarding by 7:30. three hours is not a long time to get ready when an hour of that time is already eaten up with the commute to my house and the commute to the boat! i ran home, washed and conditioned my hair ( i would have just washed, but this winter air is making my hair sooooo dry! i have to condition almost every time now!) and started to put the loc loops in when i realized that almost an hour had passed and there was no way on God's green earth i would have time to sit under the dryer, pick out my clothes, get dressed, and get the make-up on. so what was i going to do with my hair!! it was wet still with NO time to even consider the dryer. i had to do some sort of style!
so i went to my ever faithful mistress, youtube!! i remembered seeing a vid by one of the ladies i subscribe to. she has micro braids and she did this video on cute ponytail styles. i had to slightly modify her style because my hair is just too bulky and too many different lengths to do the bun she did in the vid, but the criss cross in the front was BANGIN'!!!!

you can find her vid here

and here is me with the hairstyle. please excuse the quality of the pics, i had to use my phone cause the battery on my camera died

that little glittery thing up top is a jeweled flower pin i stuck in to make sure the locs wrapped around the ponytail didn't unravel








and here's a pic of me in my sister's car, all dolled up on the way to the party!

YAY! I Used A Latch Hook!

so i finally, FINALLY did my hair. i didn't do the hot oil or the conditioner and all that, but i did it! i went through all of Thanksgiving and Christmas, all the parties and gatherings, with a frizzy, puffy hairline. i just but a headband on and kept it going. but i had to go to a funeral for a close friend's mother, and i thought "enough is enough! time to get this done!". so i latched my hair on Tuesday. by Thursday i noticed i had missed some hair and i had some little tufts of hair sticking up on the top of my head! i was a little concerned cause i had JUST latched my hair! it was tight to my scalp and there was no way i would be able to gather the loose hair and do another rotation with the nappy locs tool. so i got inspired by an update vid i saw on YouTube by a girl named PrettiBoiShai. she had recently used a latch hook to tighten her entire head and she is a new locker, has no previous experience with using a latch hook, and her hair came out looking nice. so i thought, i have to give this latch hook another try. so i did it, and it worked! i used the latch hook to pull just the the loose hair into the loc shaft. it was a wonderful, mostly easy solution to a pestering problem! i'll probably use this technique more often when i have those fly-aways along my hairline in the future. i'm veeeeeeerrrrrry happy. i did a vid with a demonstration, but i'm having trouble posting it to YouTube right now, and its too large to post on here. hopefully i'll get that figured out soon.