Mondo Dread! How to keep your dreads from becoming one unstoppable dread.

This is probably the hardest challenge I've come across so far in my quest for dreads: at the roots, they tend to tangle together in a dreadful quest to become (dun, dun, dun) MONDO DREAD! I fear if I can't figure out how to untangle them, I will not have a cute head of dreads, but rather one giant dread coming off the top of my head.

Alright, I'm exaggerating slightly. But only slightly.

Even before my the knots of my dreads became nice and tight (yay, approaching delicious rope-ness!), they were reaching out to their neighbors. I encountered a guy at the store who had nice looking dreads, about the same length as mine, but clearly further along than mine, and I asked him if he had the same problem, and what he did about it.

His answer: Yes, I had the same problem. I had a friend take my dreads and rip them apart. It definitely hurt.

Me: !!!! Ow. I'll find another way (read: I'll take the time to try to unravel the knots while I'm watching tv.)

Unraveling them worked (yeah, it took some time, but I was going to take that time to watch Firefly anyway, so it was all good), but it created a lot of loose hairs which haven't all found homes yet, and their efforts to find homes have caused lots of new dread linkage. So, I've maybe given up on being gentle with myself a little. Yank and pull!!

The good news is that the man assured me that this problems goes away between about 6-9-12 months into the dreading process, so any day now this should just fix itself ...?

In the meantime, any dreadheads know a better solution for this problem???

Maybe I could try to wash my dreads more gently, after every good scrubbing about half of them seem to have found new partners to cling to; if I go a week without pulling them apart, they're crazy all stuck together.

What do you guys think? Have you experienced this? What have you done about it?

Natural Backcombed Dreads at 6 months: knot-tastic chaos!

Wow! It's been 6 months! (For those of you counting and thinking that number must be incorrect, I re-did my dreads all by myself at the end of March-mid April -- took me a few weeks doing it by myself. I will make another post about my process, though it was roughly the same as the first one, just more uniform.) So, to honor the occasion, I'm posting pictures of my dread-tastic progress.

  I added a few fun beads. Yay for dread decorations!











 I didn't realize just how crazy-messy my dreads looked until I took the pictures for this blog post. They're much tighter than they look. Feeling the dreads individually, they've come a long way in 6 months. I used to worry that if I scrubbed them too much when washing in the shower, they'd come undone, but now they're nice and tight knots. I love it! The crazy look comes from a lot of random hairs that have come loose and haven't decided where their permanent home will be. I'm hoping another 6 months will take care of most of them.




Regardless what other people may think of the mess, I LOVE my dreads right now, and I'm really excited to watch as they get tighter and the loose hairs get sucked in. They feel really cool, like ropes, so I know everything's going as it should.