Por Fin

I finally finished my re-ti on the back portion of my hair! Wooohoooo! It took me 3 movies to get it done - Changeling, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Notorious. I started off with a quickie baking soda wash, followed by a combo wash of Hugo's Natural Red Tea & Yland Ylang shampoo & Oyin's Honey Hemp Conditioner. I also did a hot oil treatment (using my new hooded dryer) and ended it all with a good old fashioned ACV rinse. Phew! And then I started on re-tightening my hair. Crazy, right?

Nothing else to report. No pictures. Just sweet relief to finally be done. I'll attempt this agin in another 6 weeks.

Weekend Update

Well, I finally bit the bullet and re-ti'd the front portion of my hair. What a difference that made! It looked neater and the back still looked full - I like it like that. I've combined a few more of my babies around the hairline because they were either too little or the braids kept unraveling.

I had a great time in Chicago with my friends, but didn't sport any noteworthy 'dos. You know me, the Queen of Freestyle. *sigh* And, though I didn't get any idiots touching my hair, I did get a few compliments from strangers. One came from a guy at Funky Buddha. He approached me, drink in hand, smiling from ear to ear, and enthusiastically exclaimed, "I LOVE your dreads!" Ummm... Really? How in the world can you see my hair in this dark room? I thanked him and felt a little bit like I had arrived. My babies aren't all sealed yet, but they are now being recognized by others as locs. Sweet!

This weekend was the first time I'd seen many of my friends in a year or more. There were some folks I hadn't seen in 3 years. The first thing they all said to me when they saw me was some variation of, "Wow! You look great!" Of course, me being me, I can't take a compliment very well, so I am now left wondering just how horrible I looked before. I even saw a guy I... had a situationship with and he said I looked great, kept staring, and finding excuses to keep hugging me. Really? I thought I was bumming it with my t-shirt and jeans. *shrug*

On another totally unrelated note, I'm thinking of including a few posts over here about my balcony container garden. I try to keep Me, My Naps, And I more family-friendly and what's more family-friendly than growing your own veggies and herbs? I know most of you don't read my other, more personal, sometimes inappropriate, hot mess, tell it like it T-I is blog called Random Thoughts, so I'll be posting mini updates over here as well. Stay tuned.

I guess I'll leave you with some pics from this weekend. My camera has been acting a donkey lately, so everything has been looking extra bright for no reason. *sigh*

Celebrating a friend's Birthday at Big Bar

And the celebration continued at Butterfly Lounge

Re-Ti Session Blues

I'm in the middle of a re-ti session and am already bored with this. Good thing I started with the front portion of my head because I have to finish it now. I can't go out the house anymore looking crazy. So far, I've watched Body of Lies and Not Easily Broken on DVD. Hooray for Redbox. I'm in the middle of watching Alexander and thinking this is the most uninspiring thing I could watch right now. Maybe I'll just catch up on Grey's and Private Practice episodes online. I'm also tempted to listen to an audiobook.

I want my hairline to be a bit neater, so I'm interlocking and twisting it. We'll see if this holds up through me sweating on the dance floor tomorrow night. Bleh! I need to keep going so I can get in the bed by 3am. Still haven't packed and I need to hit the road by 11am tomorrow.

What do you watch when you have a long re-ti or other grooming session ahead of you?

Au Naptural vs The Fuzz

I really, really, really need to do something with my hair because my roots are getting a bit out of hand. Yes, I know. How about a marathon re-ti session? Bleh! I'm just not in the mood. Sadly, I know that if I do a re-ti in short sessions, I'll never finish. Maybe I'll spend tonight with a few Redbox movies and get to work.

I'm going to Chicago tomorrow to visit some friends and have a great weekend. For many of them, this will be the first time seeing my hair in person since I've begun locing. I can't help but feel like I've got to put my best foot... or is it loc?... forward.

I thought I knew frizz before. Apparently, I had NO idea! My babies are all fuzzy wuzzy along the shaft (is this the appropriate term?) and it's driving me a bit insane. On one hand, the frizz gives my hair a texture that puts me in tactile heaven. On the other hand, the frizz also makes my hair look a bit more uncoiffed than I would like. I know this is all a part of the process, so I will not be deterred. Instead, I'll just bitch and moan about it a bit here on the blog. Ahhhh! Much better.

Randomly, as if this post wasn't random enough, I've noticed that a few men have recently ventured to discover how soft my hair is. I think it has something to do with the fact that my roots are VERRRRRRY loose. Guyfriend A has gotten better, but he used to have his hands all up in my hair when we were at work in the community center. He'd be all up in the roots and pulling on my coils. If I didn't wash my hair so often, I might be bothered by this. And then comes Guyfriend B. The first time I met him he put his hands in my hair. That put me off a bit seeing as how I didn't even know his name yet. Yep, he got a straight sistagirl cussing from me that night. Fast forward a couple of months and we've made nice. Now, he has permission to touch my hair whenever I see him. Why? Because that man gives the. best. scalp massages. EVER.

So, you see, I'm struggling because I want my hair to look a bit less fuzzy, but I also want it to be touchably soft. I'll figure something out soon. Thanks for reading my word salad today, Napturals.

Buds, Latching, and Curly Qs

I think I found some buds in my hair. Yipeeee! Of course, I wouldn't be me if I didn't celebrate and panic within the same breath, right? How do I know that those buds are just tangled hair and not embedded lint? Gross! The first one I found had some lint in it, so I've been kind of paranoid ever since. Have I been paranoid to the point where I'll wrap my hair up at night? Of course not. That would make too much sense. I inspected a few more of them and they just look like a tangled mass of hair, but I'm not sure.

I still haven't done a re-ti on my entire head. At this point, the front is beginning to look a bit fuzzy and my roots in the center and back of my head are amazingly thick. I don't want to wait too long, but I'm loving the fullness of the back of my head right now. Well, that and I'm being uber lazy. Something tells me semi-freeforming might be in my future sooner than I thought. I offered to teach one of my guy friends how to do it so I could enlist his help. Knowing him, this would probably last all of one time before he got uppity and decided he wanted to charge me for his services. Nerp! Not gonna happen, buddy.

Some of the Curly Qs on the ends of my hair are beginning to disappear. I will miss them when they're gone. I wonder if I can pick them out after my locs are completely sealed/formed?

Bleh!

That's how I'm feeling about my hair these days. I interlocked the front of my hair over 2 weeks because I'm lazy and had more important things to do... like become a Doctoral Candidate. Wahoo! Not sure if I mentioned it on this blog, but I've been stressing out since January about this big paper that determined whether or not I would be allowed to finish my grad program. Anyway, my hair has taken a back burner to my academic life. Perhaps this is one of the many joys of having locs or braidlocs. I haven't had a bad hair day since I started my journey in December.

Where was I? Ah, yes. I interlocked the front part of my hair last week. I'm not in the mood to do the rest of my head and I like playing with the new growth. My roots feel great between my fingers. I'l probably bite the bullet and finish my hair before I leave for DC on the 25th to meet my cousins for our girls' retreat. I adore those ladies!

I've sort of changed up my routine a bit. I've stopped using Oyin's Honey Hemp Conditioner. *Gasp!* I know. I'm not sure, but I feel like my locs were feeling a bit more frizzy and looked duller whenever I used it. Too bad, because it smells great and works wonders on my new growth. I need to figure out how to use the rest of that bottle to benefit my babies. Last weekend I opted for a hot oil treatment with honey, EVOO, and EVCO. I then washed with baking soda and rinsed with ACV. Talk about soft hair??!!! I'd been slipping on my ACV treatments, but I see now that I must go back. I've also been experiencing a horrible case of the itchies, so going back to my weekly ACV treatments should definitely help.

Did I mention that I went into Sally's for a simple, tabletop hooded dryer and was convinced by another loced sista (very rare for this area to see another sista let alone a natural and loced one) to order the semi-professional, free-standing rolling one that was on sale this month. I shelled out $100+ for a damn dryer. Yea. I'll just have to do lots of hot oil treatments and roller sets to compensate for my ridiculousness. Seriously though, what convinced me to get it was the fact that using it didn't require me to sit uncomfortably with my back to a table. So long as it can reach an outlet, I can plug that bad boy up and sit under it anywhere. This means I could probably even blog browse NP play on Face.book work on my dissertation as I dry my hair. Sweet!

That's all I've got. I'm afraid I haven't gotten any better at taking pics either. I'm still rocking the freestyle look because it's cute, no fuss, and works for me. I'll see if I can snag some pics from my friend's camera of my hair this past weekend.

Until next time, Napturals....

It Could All Be So Simple...

But I was making it rather hard. Let's start from the beginning.

I've seen the videos and read the NP threads about latching or interlocking, but it just wasn't making sense to me. Why go through all of this effort when you could twist those bad boys and keep it moving? So, I twisted the front of my hair sometime around week 4. It looked pretty fresh to death if I do say so myself. That is, until I rinsed my hair. Yea. Not so cute that look. I needed to try an alternate method. The problem? I had no clue how to go about interlocking.

All that talk about 4 point versus 3 point rotations, y pattern warnings, and compass-like directions was a bunch of mumbo jumbo to me. Then, to complicate matters, there are fiftyleven tools that can be used. Some folks use the Nappylocs tool. Others use a crochet hook - and a subpopulation of these folks complain about their hair geting caught on the hook. And then you have the rebels. The DIYers. The folks that said Later for all this purchasing of crap. I'll just make it my damn self! These are the folks that took paperclips, wire, masking tape, or a sewing needle and McGuyvered their own hair tools. Ha! These are my type of peoples.

It's been 7 weeks and my new growth is outta control.
So, off I went to NP and YouTube for a refresher course on interlocking. *Enter msfullroller's vid* I'd seen her video before I was locked and had that squinty-eye-lean-head-to-the-side look going on as I watched it. Your girl wasn't understanding anything that was going on. But last night... EUREKA and Thank God! I got it. I made two tools from a small and a large paper clip and went to work on a small section of my freshly washed hair. I looked in the mirror in disbelief at how simple and effective this method really is.

Paper clips work just fine for me

Can you see the difference? The right side has been re-tightened

Twisting, for me, is a quick fix. I'm thinking interlocking is where it's at. It might take a while to do, but that's what I get for having so much darn hair and then having a bunch of small braidlocs on top of that. I'll keep you posted on how the retightening session goes. Something tells me I'll be at it for a few hours.