Flat Twist Half Bun with Decorative Hair Pins

This has turned out to be the first version of what has come to be my signature style. The first time I did my hair like this my sister took one look at my hair and exclaimed, “Your hair is really cute.” My niece and my mom enthusiastically confirmed that this was a really cute do. When I take it out, I always miss it so I end up putting it back in.

I dress it up with different accessories in the back to hold the bun in place and also part my hair differently in the front top and sides to vary the look.

Double Flat Twist Puff

 One of the main reasons I do such intricate flat twist style is because of my broken off hairline. As long as my hair is, my hairline prevents me from trying styles where I could just brush the top back. I shampooed last night but am not ready to do any intricate twist or flat twist hair dos. So I started experimenting and this is what I came up with.

Now my edges still look rough, but they appear to be laying down better cause their a tad bit longer. I will say that I’m not liking the way my moisturizer is making my hair feel these days either. The glycerine can’t work at all in cooler weather. Yep, I’ma definitely going to have to find something different for the winter months. Dang. 

I’m not really crazy about the quality of these pics. I’m experimenting with the exposure settings. I’ve actually really come to hate my digital camera. I have a Canon EOS Digital Rebel. It under exposes everything…even with a flash. And white balancing the camera is 100% necessary because if you don’t, you get some really nasty looking color cast to the pics. Even with the white balance, the color is not great.

When my sister was in college, she pressed her hair. She’d wear her hair like this, but then she’s secure her hair in the back with a side comb. Back then, her hair was really long and healthy. But you’d never know how long her hair was cause she never, ever wore it any other way.

I’d really day dream about having really long hair, which translates into a very massive puff. Right now, considering shrinkage, I guess this ‘lil ‘ol puff will do. I love shrinkage wehn I wear my twists. But with this do, I’d love to counteract the shrinkage just a little to in order to have more volume. Oh well, time and patience will get me there. Right?

Well, I think I can get away with wearing this for a couple of days. Tonight, I’m going to take the slider barrette and the ouchless elastic ponytail band out. Braid the puff up and put my scarf on. Hope this do survives for a couple of days with out having to do anything accept put my puff back in. If so, I won’t have to do a serious protective style until Wednesday.

Shrinkage, Length and Texture Differences

Before I shampoo, I also wanted to take some pics that show length and also illustrate my different textures.

 

In the top, my hair is about 12-13 inches long.

Can you see how straight my hair is in front. Top and front have a looser nap pattern than my crown, back and sides. Lower portions of my hair stretch to three inches past the beginning of my armpits. I hate that way of measuring, but it gives you an automatic visual.

Looks like my hair is stretching out just past my shoulders in this pic. It’s not a really good stretch though, I was just having fun.

Breakage, Growth and Progress

Y’all, it’s shampoo day. Yep it is. It’s been a little more than eight months since I started keeping a journal. In fact, I started documenting my journey on February 14, 2006. Back then, my hair out of braids was still so new to me, and after I joined Nappturality, I really began paying a lot more attention to my hair with regards to its overall health, its likes, dislikes, wants, needs and length. Although my hair was relatively healthy, I realized my hairline was shot to hell from wearing microbraids for three-and-a-half years. Pressing my hair had damaged it beyond repair in several spots, and yet through all of this, I had relatively good length.

The picture at right depicts burned straight hair. Look at the twist that I had set on a flexible rod so I could have a curly cue with this hair style. See how the top part of the twist is all plump and healthy and the last few inches is bone straight? If you didn’t know better, You’d think I still had relaxed ends. Nope. Did that with a pressing comb all through my hair and all on the same day!

Ahhh…the length. I think this is when I also, for the first time, realized that my hair had the potential to grow really long. So that will continue to be a long-term hair goal. That’s why I agonized over cutting out my heat damage that was in the front of my head. It was really messing my twist hair styles up. Some parts of my hair was long and stringy and so one day, I just cut all the straight parts out. Then for a while, I was literally sick about it. That’s when I posted on NP and someone told me that having even hair was over rated when you’re a nappy. I got to thinking about that and that really changed my whole view on that. When you’re nappy, your naps hide the disparities in length. So much so, that most of the time I don’t notice how short my hair is in a few spots. Except my hairline. That I notice. As a result, I do everything I can to keep the stress off my hairline so that it can grow back. Today, I decided to document the challenges I’m having with growing my hair back in four spots. Some due to breakage and others because I got scissor happy. In either case, it will be interesting to see what kind of progress I make six months from now.

I started noticing thinner shorter hair in these two areas way back in 1995 when I was still perming my hair. Then, I only exacerbated the problem when I started wearing microbraids back in 2002. I know the braids were weighing too heavily on my hairline right here and was tearing it out. By the time I stopped wearing microbraids in about July of 2005 I was nearly bald right here. Thank goodness it’s growing back…very slowly but apparently surely.

 

The differences in length is due to the heat damage I cut out. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. The shorter hair makes it really hard for me to just comb my hair back and wear an occasional puff because my hair just won’t lay down and it looks very fuzzy in spots. I started wearing a scarf to hide the damage, but really, I think I may have caused some additional breakage by wearing the scarves this summer.

As much as I loved my phony pony several weeks ago, I was sleeping in the slider barrette that was holding it in place. I took it all down just one week later because I had a sneakly suspicion that I was damaging my hair. I was right. When I pull my hair back into a pony tail, this little lock of hair is now about the length of where my ponytail band was. Looks like it was cut by scissors. This hair used to stretch past my shoulders.

So what’s the hair lesson for today? Don’t do things that stress your hairline. Keep all sources of heat away from my precisous naps and do not sleep in hair accessories.  

Click here to view more pics and Shampoo Day Updates in Banding and Shampooing 

My Naps as Art

Today, my hair is very, very fuzzy. But I have no desire to touch it up at the moment. Think my scarf came off last night. It usually doesn’t, but when it does I usually feel it, wake up and put it back on. Didn’t feel like doing that last night. This evening I decided to lurk in Roshini.net and ran across a pic that inspired me to try something I saw in her album. Although my hair isn’t as long as her’s in the pic I saw, I thought I might be able to pull it off. The one thing I like about her, is that she will work a style to its most absolute fuzzy death before she restyles — and she always looks adorable. It doesn’t matter if her do is one day old or several weeks old. I really admire that.

 Anyway, I decided to take pics. Once I got them downloaded, I decided to get all artsy with them. Gave me a reason to play around with some features in my Photoshop Elements software. It was fun, and I really, really, like how they turned out. Please, enjoy!

My hair is currently parted and styled to wear in a Flat Twist Half Bun. It’s my favorite style. I simply pull my flat twists back and secure midway with a slider barrette. The rest of the twists hang freely in the back. I’ve been wearing this style off and on all summer long. Everytime, I wear my hair a different way, I miss this style, so I put it back in. In the pic above, I’ve taken the bun down and let all the hair twists hang freely. I think my hair would look really cute if I wore a head band across the top to. I need to find one that I’d really like to wear.

 

I thought this turned out really cool. It’s a pic of the back of my head…just in case you can’t tell.

Another pic of the back of my head. I’ll really be glad when the twists in the top of my head reach all the way down to my collar. That will give me the thickness that I long for and make my hair look and lay sooo much better. I’m not terribly unhappy with my hair right now, but this falls right in line with my hair goals. I think I’ll name this one Twisted Envy.

Next, I pulled my twists back into a pony tail. I never wear my hair like this because I’ve never had enough hair. But now, as you can see it’s getting pretty long. However, I’d still like my hair to be longer and fuller before I pull my hair back like this. I hate looking bald.

Here, I pulled the ponytail twists up toward the top of my head and secured with a bobby pin. Actually, I had to make my ponytail a little lower so when I pulled it up, it would sit so high ontop of my head.

Ok…you really have to look closely at this pic, cause the frost effect and the shadow cast again the wall when I took the pic kinda makes me look like I have a really big head. As you can see, I decorated the bottom of the ponytail with a gold slider barrette. Looking at this pic, I ended up moving the barrette up…just a tad…cause I don’t think it was covering the ouchless band I used to secure my hair in a ponytail.

Yeah! This is really cool!

The effect in this pic isn’t as abstract so you can see my hair and the barrette a lot better.

 

I really like how this effect turned most of the pic black & white but left just a touch of color in it. I’m not crazy about the pic in terms of showing my hair, but for overall asthetic reasons, I really like it.