Newest Products

ya'll know i'm a product junkie. i know i need to deal with this, but lets put that aside for now and let me tell you about the two newest products in my stash. let me start off by saying that one of these products has a bad "cone" in it. a "cone" is the end part of a certain type of chemical that they put in hair products. good "cones" will help moisturize hair while bad "cones" will basically be like petroleum, they will make your hair feel waxy and smooth, but they will in fact be sealing OUT moisture. but the use of a good clarifying shampoo will take care of that. all the stuff about "cone" i learned from my sister who is a natural hair and natural product person. she's very particular about what she uses in her hair.
but i have an relaxed attitude about most hair care products. i use shampoos with laurel sulphates and all that stuff. i use products and i don't always check the back for the ingredient list. the only thing i always stay away from is mineral oil. i just pretty much listen to how my hair responds to certain products. my hair feels soft and healthy. i don't have a problem with dry hair or split ends or shedding and breaking or any of that. so i use what works well for me. i do make my own daily spritz for my hair that is only full of good stuff, though. i do try to use good things in my hair as well, too!! but i don't stress about whats in a lot of products, especially if my hair responds well to it.

anywho, the first product is: Hydrating Tea Tree Mint Leave-In Moisture Mist by Organix.




this is the one with the good "cone". I've used the shampoos and conditioners from this brand in the past. It was okay, but I didn't feel the results were worth the price of the bottle. The tag line on the bottle says: An ultra hydrating blend of Australian tea tree oils to add moisture and strength, while nourishing your hair with replenishing moisturising milk proteins and micro infused peppermint oils for hydration and balance.

I was going to write out all the ingredients, but i got lazy. needless to say, there are 16 ingredients and some of them are dimethicone copolyol (the good "cone"), Australian tea tree oil, soy milk protein, peppermint oil, glycerin, silk amino complex, and vitamin E. the first ingredient is water, the last is fragrance. i love the smell of tea tree oil. this product has a nice blend of tea tree oil and mint smell and the smell lasts on my hair for days. my home-made spritz i use had tea tree oil in it,too, so i tend to use that more just because i know exactly whats in it, but every few days or so, i like to use this as well for that added minty smell.

the second product is Color Extend by Redkin.


the tag line says: Shine Enrich. Protective shine serum for color treated hair. and then is says Cranberry Oil a little father down on the front of the bottle. this is the product with the bad "cone". this product has 19 ingredients, most of which are chemical compounds that i can't pronounce. cranberry oil is 10th on the list. this product is basically suppose to work like Frizz Ease, but it also has a color protectant in it. i don't care about "smooth fly-away, and impart a mirror-like shine" part, but i do feel that my color is staying vibrant a lot longer than it usually does. red is one of the hardest colors to keep vibrant. it fades and washes out so fast! i really feel like this product is helping with that. and it smells really nice, too.

so there you go. these, along with my home-made daily spritz, are the only things i'm using in my hair. the spritz on a mostly daily basis, these two products on a weekly-ish basis.

Palmrolling With No Product

so, i lost my nappy loc tool and i made a few homemade tool out of paper clips. it worked really well when i had longer hair cause my locs tapered down naturally into smaller tips and i was able to lace that through my homemade tool. i wasn't able to lace the whole tool through my loc like the NappyLoc tool. i just inserted the tip through the new growth, put the tip on my loc end through the tool, and drew the hair through. but with my new haircut, my sister cut my hair straight across which gave me very blunt, fat ends. so i was no longer able to fit the end through the tip of my home made tool. so my answer to this was to just palmroll. i know i wrote a couple of posts ago that i had tried this again and i didn't like the outcome cause i was finding the gel that i used was getting caught in my hair at the point where the loced hair met loose, unloced hair. well, to combat this, i just palmrolled with absolutely NO PRODUCT!!!! after washing, i just did the palmroll method i did a video about in my Tried Palmrolling Again... post. and it held pretty damn well, if i do say so myself!!!!!! definitely as good as when i used the ORS lock and twist gel! and it lasted just as long, too! i was able to go three weeks in between palmrolling before i noticed the twists loosening! AMAZING!!!!!!!! this was the answer to all my problems! but eventually i wanted to latch again cause i get pain when i get too much loose hair.

what was that, you say?

yup, when i have too much loose hair at my scalp, my head gets tender and sore. why? well, i'm not quite sure, but i've hypothesized that its because the hair of each loc doesn't grow in evenly. so, for example, the hair on one side of my loc will grow slower than the other part and my loc will start hanging funny and i feel the stress of that hair being pulled tight as it tries to hang evenly because of the weight of the loc. kinda along the lines of when you get braided extensions in your hair and you try and put that freshly braided hair into a ponytail, and because the hair was braided in one direction,usually down, it hurts to try and pull it up into the ponytail. get what i'm saying? but when i re-latch and there's less loose hair, the tenderness goes away. i don't know what that's about, but there you go! LOL
so, i bought two more NappyLoc tools, one medium sized, which is the size i had before, and one large sized to help deal with the larder ends. i re-latched my hair over three days about a week ago and i'm feeling mighty fine!
as my hair grows in, depending on how lazy i'm feeling, i may palmroll again for a few months before i latch again, or i may just go right to the latching, i don't know. it will depend on my mood. but i'm glad i found out that plain water will work just as well for me!

All Red!

so its been 2 months since i cut my hair and i'm loving it more and more. I've done a couple of new things with my hair since November. I went all red! that's right, from root to tip! before, with my red tips, i bleached my hair first to get it as close to white as possible so the red would really POP!!! but i left like 5 inches of black root for contrast. well this time, i didn't do any bleaching. the L'Oreal Hi-Lift i use already has a lifter in it. so i just ( i say "i" but really it was my sister. she's the one who usually colors my hair! LOL) used the color over my black hair. i didn't expect it to be SOOOOO red! i actually didn't like it at all! i didn't take too many pic with it all red. i though t i looked a bit freaky. but here are a couple of pics of my hair right after i colored it. one is right after the wash, and one is after i retwisted the front.





just for comparison, i'll put in a few pics og how my hair looked before i went all red





see the difference?!?! i was a bit much to take! but i just got my new NappyLoc tools and i just recently re-latched my hair, and i have some black roots! not too much, but enough to make me feel comfortable. isn't that funny. i actually WANT roots to show in my hair! LOL!! anywho, here is the last batch of pics. this was taken two days ago, so this is how my hair is looking now. i know i have a hood on, but you get the idea!

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...