Soft Spike Curls, the economical way!

I spent a mere $2 on some Chenille Multi-colored Pipe cleaners. The solid colered ones appeared to be small in deminsion.
There were 25 to a package. I used a total of 40 for my head. The front was better at holding curls because I did the front first. The back was the first to go as far as curls and waves are concerned. I only used water and tea tree oil right after a shampoo.

Here's the results. locked hair set pipe cleaners using pipe cleaners to roller set locs

Month 26 and my computer is broken :-(

Saturday will make 26 months with my Sisterlocks. I need to retighten my hair bad, but really I need a professional retightening because March will make a year of me doing it "on my own", including the 3-4 month spell of having no retightening at all. When my money gets correct, I'll be making an appointment with GiGi. Hopefully soon. Since I need a retightening I don't mess with my hair much. There are small and thin root beds which in my humble opinion are too weak to be manipulating. I've been combining locks to save them and have been retightening here and there. It's growing rather fast. Free style is all I can do right now. Although, I am dreaming of other options with the length. I love my sister's hair. Even though her mane is thick, I like the way it has it's own salon style cut. I think they call it "Lock envy".
For the last week or so, my computer has been broken. Of course, EVERYTHING is on my internal hard drive, which I cannot get into. Oh well. I have been using Jen's Mac G4, and patiently waiting for some help from my computer technician back in California to give me some tips on what to do and a quote to fix the thing.

This has surely slowed down my photo blogging, and writing on my desktop in general. I have been trying to post something/anything that comes to mind on my blogspot writing blog. My goal is to transfer a lot of stuff I've written on my Live Journal onto my writing blog so it will all be in one place. Blogger is more user friendly to me than Live Journal. Props still go out to Live Journal, cause that's where I cut my teeth with this blogging thing over two years ago. My other struggle is learning how to get back into my website to make changes since they upgraded my account. So much to do, so little time.

I took this picture of myself with a few locks over my eye with the macro feature on my camera. Click on the picture to enlarge it. Cool, huh?

6 months ago I could have cut my locks off

Six months ago, I was in grave need of a retightening. Jen and I moved back home to Waco and the last time I had a retightening was the second week in March by Imani-Nash-Bey, our California consultant. The weird thing about it, is I was getting compliments all the while from March, to April, the May, to June right up til' July 13th when we heading up to Euless to meet GiGi and me taking the retightening class. Why do I say all of this? Because for those folks who think that Sisterlocks are permanent and you have to shave your head if you change you mind, that's not exactly true. As it was, I was between a rock and a hard place, geographically and financially and for both reasons could not get my hair retightened in four months. Now for those of you who are very faithful to retightenings every 4-6-8 weeks, just imagine if you had to go a whole 4 months without getting your locks retightened. That's what happened to me.



I'll tell you, the reality for me is I had over 3 inches of new growth in some places and IF I ever had the chance of cutting or shaving my locks off, this would have been it. But wait, shaving it would not have been the most sensible thing to do. I could have simply cut the locks off and with the new growth I had, jumped right back into braids, an afro or two strand twists. From the pictures you can see it really didn't look like I had that much new growth. So for those of you who are afraid that getting Sisterlocks will have you "locked" for life, there is a way of escape. I'm not advocating getting Sisterlocks and then chickening out and cutting them off. Naw! I'm just saying if you have to cut em' it's not that big of a deal.

Believe it or not, the haters who question you getting locked make you think and stand behind your convictions. They are healthy, like a lil' stress. They keep you on your toes and help you in your personal assurance that you didn't get locked because of fashion or fad, but because you wanted to get locked for you! The blogs and your own personal blog is a good place to send folks. It usually helps folks understand the process we go through when we lock our hair.