Being Thankful

I spent a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends and tried out new techniques with my hair.
Here is my Thanksgiving look:

I tried Flat African Threading as shown on the YT channel Chocolate Hair/Vanilla Care. I enjoyed trying it out although the next time I do it I'll make sure to use a curved needle. My fingers and brain didn't always want to agree on what we were doing and a straight needle made it more painful than necessary.

Here is a close up of the front:

The back was styled using Curl Formers and although it took me a moment to get the handle of it I have to say that I enjoy wearing them more than Flexi-rods. However, I'm tender headed so I won't sleep in them again. The next time I want a "until I go to bed" curly style I'll just do my hair early in the morning and sit under the dryer.

The style lasted all day even though I didn't remove all the Curl Formers correctly or go back and make them all lie down neatly. I knew I'd have to do something different with the back the next day so I wasn't super worried about it.

The little white sparkles you see are beads that I threaded in as I was doing the flat threading. I've never attempted something like this but I will be doing it again because I like the look.

With the versatility and moisture retention of African Threading, I'm fairly sure that I'll be rocking threaded looks for all of 2014.

If you've ever mixed techniques or styling options I'd love to see what you've done. Feel free to post your creations here.

Why a Wash-n-Go will always be a "That's a No" for me.

Once I got over the shock of my big chop one of the first things that I noticed about my hair was the amazing amount of shrinkage it had. Once it was shrunken, I could take what appeared to be very little hair and stretch it out for an inch or so.

It didn't take me long to realize that my hair loves to interlock on itself like a well-knit  cap. I could spend a lot of time and effort trying to enhance and coax the curls to come out and play, or I could learn to work with other styles to achieve my ultimate hair goal of hip-length  hair.

Fast forward two years and two months and you have what I like to call a lesson reinforcement moment when I needed to head out for a family outing, and my hair was not ready.

Once a year I straighten my hair to trim the ends. I tried trimming curly at one point and ended up needing to remove almost a 1/2 inch to correct my mistakes. For this trip I had planned to wear my hair straightened and I had already DC'd and done everything I needed to do for the straightening process when I found out that I didn't have a blow dryer (mine was on loan, and my daughters was a well.) We were leaving in a few hours, and I needed a style, so I decided to go with a wash-n-go. I didn't have any gel (thanks kids!) so I used water with aloe, Shea Butter and Coconut Oil.

Here I am almost ready to go. My hair is still fairly wet, but I wasn't going to let my hair situation keep me from enjoying my family and our time together.

Here is a side view, and you can see what I mean about shrinkage. My hair begins to shrink as soon as there is no pressure on it. The hair at my temples is not heat damaged I just have an entirely different curl pattern in those areas. My hair has 3 distinctive curl zones with two of them being closer in tightness and shrinkage than the other.

 

Looking at it from the back you can clearly see my neck even though when it's stretched/straightened it's BSL.

 Here I am getting ready for bed; I decided to go ahead and take this all the way through the Pineapple experience to show everyone what I'm talking about when I say my hair and I don't really get along with the wash-n-go process.

Here I am the next morning. As you can see everything above the scarf line has shrunk down considerably. Yes, my hair does curl at the ends but the roots have more of a z pattern.

I wanted to show that I used a head band to try to keep the curls elongated.If I had not lifted it out of my hair it would have been almost invisible because my hair will take on and keep gravity defying shapes. *Smile*

 Here is the final results of my wash-n-go and pineapple. The hair in the back shrank down to 2.25 inches, which is about 90% with most of the rest shrinking down 70% or so.

I tried pulling the hair down a bit after taking out the headband, but the results were less than ideal. I know that there are products and methods that might improve the results and enhance my curls, but I don't feel like that is the best use of my time and money.

I believe that my length retention is supported by me not manipulating my hair on a regular basis. When I create a twisted style, I plan for them to last at least one week with two to three being my preference. They need to last through work-outs, co-washes, be length retention friendly as well as non-time-consuming to maintain.

I'd like to know if any of you with similar curl patterns and/or lengths have found wash-n-go's to be successful.