There's a SPIDER in my dreads!

Tis the holiday season, and that means time with family. Unfortunately, family does not always love your dreads as much as you do.

I visited my sister's house with my mother over Thanksgiving, and my sister interrupted the conversation to say, "Whenever I look at your hair, I think about spiders." Amazingly enough, my mother immediately agreed, saying she felt the same way!

Then my sister told me a dread horror story:

There once was a dreadhead who was very sick. He went from doctor to doctor, and none of them knew what to do for him. They tried everything, but they couldn't figure out what was wrong. Eventually, they decided to do an MRI to see if he had something wrong in his brain. They told him the MRI would work better if he shaved his dreads, and although he loved his dreads, he was so tired of being sick he felt any sacrifice that would help was worth it.

When he shaved his head, they realized what was wrong. His head was completely covered in spider bites! A black widow had nested in his dreads, and she bit him at night while he slept, slowly killing him with her lethal poison. The end.

Creepy, right? Yeah, I was shivering when I went to sleep that night on my sister's couch thinking, "Could a spider really crawl into my dreads without me realizing?"

I was creeped out, and I almost wanted to brush my dreads out right there to avoid any future horror stories coming true. I had to stop myself and ask, "Okay, seriously, would a spider really be able to live in my hair? Does the fact that I have dreads rather than free hair make that much of a difference?"

Frankly, the answer is, "No! A spider could not live in my dreads."

Would a spider crawl over my face and through my hair in the middle of the night? Well, since apparently (I have no idea who came up with this statistic or how they know it's true, but I hear it a lot), we actually end up eating several spiders in our sleep over the course of our lives, I guess I'd have to say that it's likely there are spiders crawling over me at night, whether I have dreads or not. They've never tried to house themselves in my hair before, so why would they now? Well, maybe dreads look more cozy than straight hair? Maybe, but in that case wouldn't course hair and curly hair also look more cozy than straight hair?

Still, let's say that for some reason, dreads look like a good home, and the spider on the move decides not to return to his own cozy home that night (seriously unlikely seeing as they usually house themselves in places that have gone untouched for months, like undusted corners and inside huge stacks of firewood). So, a spider moves in, defying all odds. Would that spider survive?

No, if defying all odds, a spider decided to leave his cozy nest in a safe, unnoticed corner of my house and move right into my hair, that spider would not live long. Why? Because I WASH my hair, and I FIDDLE with it (because I'm one of those silly people that always has to be fidgeting with something - playing with my hair, my ring, my necklace, or tapping my foot, wiggling my toes, etc). That little spider would be poisoned with shampoo and washed down the drain or squashed in no time!

But in all seriousness, I don't know why a spider would leave his cozy nest for a dangerous one close to me (if he would, why not take up house in my bedsheets or the towels under my sink? I don't touch those very often, and they're nice and soft like dreads, with cozy room to snuggle, but I've never found a spider or a mouse or any other thing in my towels), so I don't think I'll ever find myself squashing a spider in my hair or cleaning it out and washing it down the drain.

And that's all I have to say about that. No dreadhead urban legends for me! I'm not so easily scared as that.

SPECIAL NOTE:  Wow! I have blog followers! I am so incredibly honored that you five have decided my posts are interesting enough to warrant bookmarking! So, this creepy urban legend post is dedicated to you (forgive the ick-factor, please!). Thank you for following, and I will definitely try to post a little more often, since I know I'm not just posting to keep myself busy. Again, thank you guys very much: Robin A Burrows, Deena Barrett, Juliana Haygert, Kate Spencer, and Lily Mann. I love following all of you guys on twitter, by the way! :D

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.

Opinions: Baby Dreads

I took a day trip to a neighboring town, and while I was there, I stopped by a bead shop to see if they had any dread beads. They didn't, but the owner tried to convince me that I could put "large" beads on my dreads if I smeared crisco or oil on the ends and forced the beads over. I tried to explain that I didn't want to get my dreads dirty like that and that the beads (which were barely large enough to fit over the prong of a fork) were way too small to fit on my dreads, but she insisted that if I put oil on them, they'd slip on just fine. I pretty much didn't say anything else while she took me around her shop to show me every bead she had in that "large" size; I realized she wasn't going to understand.

She clearly didn't know and didn't want to know what she was talking about. The peak example of that was when she asked, "Why would you want to do something like that to your hair?" I certainly would have loved to share the answer with someone who was interested, but her tone wasn't interest, it was disgust.

The funniest part was that, thinking out loud, she realized she was being judgmental and said, "Well, it's your hair. I guess some people wouldn't understand why I like my hair short, but I like it that way,'" and ironically, I'm one of the people who would never want to have my hair short like hers was, but it never occurred to me to question why she wanted her hair short or to comment on it.

Though I wasn't really surprised or offended that she would comment on my hair when I didn't even think to comment on hers, and I don't think that makes me a better person in any way. I chose to have an atypical hairstyle, and I knew that'd draw comments, possibly mostly negative ones. In fact, I was excited that someone noticed my hair, regardless of opinion, considering the effort that's gone into it.

The strange thing about this situation was that the lady who made the comments was the owner of the shop. The owner. That means that she should have been concerned with customer satisfaction, with trying to be pleasant. Her aversion to my hairstyle of choice overcame her desire to win business, apparently. Maybe that was due in part to the fact that she said she was also a hair dresser, and I'm sure hair dressers have strong opinions on hair. Though from what she said to me, she really didn't know anything about dreads, so she was uninformed about that particular hairstyle.

Anyway, that's been my most interesting comment on my hair so far. There've been others, but mostly they are mostly acquaintances noticing, "oh, are you dreading your hair?" Not very interesting. But at this point, my dreads aren't very interesting; they're still very new and don't look terribly dread-like yet, so it's pretty much impossible to get a compliment. Right now, the comments I get aren't really comments on how my hair looks so much as people's opinion of my ultimate goal. That in itself is interesting.

Lopsided Dreads (Backcombing's Infinite Possibilities)

As I mentioned in my dread-forming overview post, I sectioned my hair before the backcombing party in an effort to increase the uniformity of my dread distribution - randomly sized and shaped dreads, mostly larger (1-2 inches across), with a few smaller ones thrown in for variety and adorableness - but there were still three people who helped me dread my hair (mega thanks to all three of those people: Jim, Cara, and Rena!). That's four people total (including myself) who helped section, backcomb, and twist and rip my hair. If two people braid someone's hair, their braids will look different, right (one looser than another, etc)? If two people put pony tails in, their pony tails will look different, even if slightly. Well, it stands to reason, that if four people put dreads in, there will be some variation. And there was! Right after we finished putting all of my dreads in, I went to bed, but the next day, when I woke up and took the, "yay, my dreads are born!" pictures, it was obvious that one side of my head looked completely different from the other!
 



 The dreads on my right side were very distinct and appeared to stick straight out from my head. They give the appearance of being so thick and tight that they stick straight out. Appearances are deceiving though; upon touch, a lot of these dreads felt very loose (this may have something to do with the comb that was used - more on combs further on in this post!), and in truth, many of them are not sticking straight out, but rather looping towards the back of my head a bit (in this picture, you can see them leaning up and to the left). This may have been caused by the fact that as they were backcombed, they were twisted counter-clockwise.

The left side (my left) looked markedly different than the right. In fact, these dreads hardly looked like dreads at all! From appearances (at least, without looking closely), one would think that the hair on this side is free-floating and loose. Oddly enough, the dreads on this side are full of tiny, tight little knots. They also lay flatter and more naturally than the dreads on the other side of my head do; for the most part, they tend to lay downwards, rather than twisting up and to the left, like the ones on the other side.

Three different people helped make the dreads on this side of my head! So how did they all come out so consistently (and different from the other side)?

Part of it may be coincidence: most of the dreads on this side seemed to be twisted clockwise as they were dreaded, rather than counterclockwise. This may not be significant, but as I was researching dreads, I did stumble upon the rather random fact that your hair (apparently - I can't vouch for the source) naturally tends to flow in a clockwise direction over a counterclockwise direction. So, for example, more cow licks move in a clockwise direction than in a counterclockwise direction. So maybe this came into play here, in that the dreads twisted in a clockwise direction lay more naturally on my head, while the counterclockwise-twisted dreads stick up and about at odd angles and loop over themselves. This is just an idea; honestly, I have no idea how or why, but for whatever reason, the clockwise twisted ones lay flatter than the counterclockwise twisted ones, though this may be completely coincidental.

What isn't coincidental is the comb that was used to form these dreads. Almost all of the dreads on the left side of my head (my left) were formed using a thick, plastic brush with three rows of prongs. I have no idea where this comb came from (it belonged to my late husband, long before I met him), which is unfortunate because it was awesome at making dreads!  If you are thinking about backcombing your dreads, and you happen to have or find a comb like this somewhere, I'd recommend using it! I used it when I backcombed my very first baby dread, and it worked great. It formed a nice, tight dread that has survived over a week of being treated almost exactly like my normal hair (since the rest of my hair wasn't dreaded until a week after I made the first one); that means it survived even getting wet! Also, each one of the three people who helped me backcomb my hair declared that it was the best of the combs that I had available for backcombing. Backcombing seemed to go more quickly when they were using the yellow comb than when they used the other combs, and if the end result is any indication, the yellow comb may have also made tighter dreads!

These are the other combs we used. The plastic comb on the left was only used for about half a dread before the prongs began to bend. We had to run out and buy another comb! Since we couldn't find another awesome one like my yellow one above, we settled for a metal comb with one row of prongs (yes, it's a flea comb for pets - I'd heard plenty of sites recommend flea combs for doing dreads). It worked way better than the plastic comb (hey, metal won't break, right?), but seeing as the right side of my head turned out so much looser than the left side of my head, I'm thinking that it didn't work as well as my uber-cool, yellow 3-rowed plastic comb. Also, metal is a little bit more slippery than plastic is, so every now and then, it'd slip out of the dread and come sailing towards my head. I'm glad it didn't puncture my scalp. 

Even from the front and at a distance, the difference between the dreads created using the yellow comb (the dreads in the right of this picture) and the dreads created using the flea comb.

What you can't tell just by looking are the details that I listed up above: that the fuzzier dreads (the right side of this picture - my left) are actually the tighter ones and that they lay downward rather than up and to the left.

I didn't really dig this lopsided look, but no worries, it didn't last long!

The difference between the two sides of my head was pretty bad the first day, but hope was not lost! I took a shower right after taking those "just dreaded" pics, which helped to calm some of the dreads that were sticking straight up, and Jim helped me by re-backcombing a lot of the ones on the right (my right - onlooker's left) which were really loose. He used the yellow comb, of course, so they turned out nice and tight! Now, my head is looking a lot less lopsided. There's still a little more work to do on my right side, but the awkward dreads are fewer and not as obvious as they were before: my hair is looking much more uniform now! Also, I combed out one of my really big dreads and made two little twist and rip dreads, which added a little spunk (you can see one of them resting on the top of my head, on the left side of this pic). Much better, don't ya think? I definitely think so!      <3 ~~~LUVZ!!~~~ <3

My First Dread Questions (From a Curious Bystander)

Dreads' first outing (this happened before I split my skinny, rectangle dread into two pieces and added some twist and rip flavor to my bowl of backcombed happiness). Not exactly public, but the day after my dreads were put in, I went with my fiance to his mother's boyfriend's house for dinner. Before I put my dreads in, I figured they would make me a walking target for dread-related questions, and that was okay with me; I came prepared to answer questions!

My mother-in-law to be has yet to make any comment at all on my hair. Based on my fiance's warnings before I put my dreads in, I'm guessing it's due to shock, but I can't read minds, so I can't say with any certainty. She did tell me that she liked my shirt, though!

Her boyfriend, however, was not so shy, and I was grateful. I'd rather have people ask questions than wonder in silence. He was bewildered by the fact that my dreads were just "there." He is a professor, and he said that when he's seen students with dreads, they were braided. The fact that my hair appeared to be magically holding itself together in clumps had him stumped; didn't I have to braid my hair to get dreads? What had I done? When I told him that each section was backcombed, he asked, "So, will it fall out in the shower then? Do you have to re-do your hair every time you shower?" So I told him that it probably would fall out if I washed my hair right away, but I was planning on using a shower cap for the first couple weeks, until the knots got tight enough, and then I'd be able to wash my dreads as often as I wished without them falling out. To that he commented, "Dreads get pretty matted, don't they? You can't just brush them out. You'll have to shave them off, right?" Then I told him that although I had originally thought that was the case (and it was one of the reasons I hesitated to dread my hair for a while!), with patience, one could undo their dreads without shaving them off.

Some pretty good first questions, I think! Answering them was really fun, but I've always loved sharing my knowledge - however important or petty it might be.

When he said that he thought dreads had to be braided, I wondered to myself whether or not he had the twist and rip method of forming dreads in mind. The next day, I split one of my larger dreads in two and made two new dreads using the twist and rip method, and after seeing them, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what he was thinking. The twist and rip dreads look very much like little braids (see my previous post for a picture). Having a couple of them in my hair adds some character.

Meanwhile, the rest of hair, backcombed as it is, appears to just be hanging out in clumps, almost as if by its own free will - like an uber-duber, crazy-bad case of stringy, clumpy bedhead! And I love it! Can't wait to see how my hair looks as they mature. A little more presentable, I imagine; frizz be tamed!

Head full of Dreads! (My Dread-Forming: An Overview)

They're in! Thanks to my dearest fiance, Jim; my amazing sister, Cara; and my awesome friend, Rena, my hair is now knotted into 42 dreads! 40 of them were formed using the backcombing method, and 2 of them were formed using the twist and rip method.

I chose the backcombing method over the twist and rip method for the majority of my dreads because I had heard that the backcombing method works better for thicker dreads, and after looking at many different heads of dreads on the web, I felt positive that the look I was hoping for would best be achieved with thicker dreads: those formed from a section of hair about an inch or more across. In addition, I was hoping that dreads would add a sense of volume to my hair, and although I was never able to find a photo comparison between dreads using the twist and rip method and those formed by backcombing, I heard a few times that backcombed dreads had more volume. With all of this information, I decided that backcombing was the best way for me to form the dreads that I wanted.

So why the two twist and rips? Mostly just curiosity: I want to know if there's a difference between the two start-styles. Which dreads more quickly? How different do they look when first made? Once matured? How long does it take them to mature, and is the time-to-mature very different between the two styles? The opportunity to make them came after the dread party. When I was going through my hair and picking out the dreads that were loose, I discovered a section of hair that was very long and rectangular. I'd heard that dreads coming from square, round, or triangle sections of hair are more likely to grow out round (rather than some strange, flat or otherwise awkward shape), so I decided to comb out the skinny, rectangle dread and replace it with two smaller, but more square dreads. Since those two dread were very small (maybe half an inch by three quarters of an inch or so) compared to my other dreads, and I had heard that twist and rip was great for smaller dreads, about that size, I seized the opportunity to experiment. The two twist and rips look like little braids floating amidst my fuzzy, backcombed dreads. They're cute and fun.

Before we began backcombing, I sectioned my hair: using tiny elastics, I made pigtails all over my head where I wanted my dreads to be later (I forgot to take a picture, but it looked pretty hilarious). I chose to section it beforehand, rather than having my friends just grab and section as those chose so that one side of my head wouldn't end up with thicker dreads than the other. So basically, I chose to section my hair beforehand to increase uniformity. I wanted uniformity between the two sides of my head, but not from dread to dread. We sectioned my hair so that it would have a mix of dread-sizes, mostly larger, but with a few smaller ones thrown in.

Also, I sectioned my hair beforehand because I had a specific pattern in mind for my dreads: brick. That means that we first sectioned the bottom inch or so of my hair, then when we formed the sections for the next inch or so above that, we formed the dreads between two of the dreads below (rather than directly over one of them), hiding the parts between the dreads so there wouldn't be a clean part all the way up the side of my head. Despite what sounds like a rigorously uniform sectioning of my hair, my dreads are actually all different sizes, and my sections are all different shapes (though we tried to make them mostly square, round, or triangle, as much as possible). Although the randomness did happen naturally (and I think would be very hard to prevent - I can't imagine how much work it would take to get all of one's dreads the same size and in nice, even rows!), it was what I was hoping for, so I am glad that everything worked out so well.

I only used one elastic in my hair. A day after we backcombed my dreads, some of them were pretty loose, and the middle one, in the back of my head, by my neck had pretty much completely fallen out. I believe this happened for two reasons: the hair on my neck is the shortest of my hair, only 3-4 inches long, and this particular dread is a relatively small dread compared to my others (the section is at most an inch or so across), and backcombing works best with thick sections. Anyway, because even doing the backcombing over again completely, the poor dread seemed ready to fall out, I put an elastic at the bottom of it. It's the only dread I have any kind of elastic or rubber band around, and it's only at the bottom.

I've read that thicker backcombed dreads knot up faster than thinner backcombed dreads, so I'm hoping that my dreads will set "quickly" (maybe 2-4 months instead of 4-6 before they stop looking like a really bad version of bedhead and start resembling mature dreads). Time will tell!

The coolest part about all of this is that I have the exact dreads I was picturing! How did that happen? I did a little research, but there wasn't an exact guidebook for the dreads that I wanted (I found a lot of sites that said, stop brushing your hair and they'll form naturally, and others that said, "make 1/2-1 inch sections and use wax"), so for the most part, I was winging it, with the sectioning, the choice on how to form the dreads, everything. I'm SO excited that they not only turned out, they're awesome! When creating my dreads, I was aiming for fun and funky, big and bold, yet random - and somehow they turned out even better than I imagined! I wasn't really sure what to expect, or if it'd work for me, and sure, right now they're more frizz than dreads, but it's a beautiful, frizzy beginning. I see the future in those tangles, and it's even more exciting than I'd hoped!

Extra kudos and thanks to Rena, who helped section my hair and backcombed half of my head all by herself!

Extra kudos and thanks to Cara, who backcombed between contractions (I'm not kidding! They were intense, but they ended up being false alarms - my nephew is still hangin' out in his mama). She's a tough cookie!

Extra kudos and thanks to Jim, who in addition to helping backcomb on Friday, also did most of the sectioning beforehand and helped me on Saturday and Sunday by re-backcombing the ones that were loose!! He also did one of the rip and twist dreads (I did the other).