9½ years!

Picture time!

My darling hubby gave me 4 Terry Pratchett books for my hairniversary. I have the best hubby in the world!

I’m finally, finally at a clear and obvious knee length!

The ends are a bit weird though being noticeably wavier than the rest (And thinner!)

Opinions on taking about 10 cm off? (Edit: Scratch that, hubby vetoed it)

None of the front pictures turned out really well. It’s a really dark, rainy and stormy day so they light was absolutely horrible to take pictures in

A humble request aka messing with a friend

Nightshade on UTT aka the owner of

http://nightbloominggarden.blogspot.com/

and http://www.etsy.com/shop/nightblooming

brought to my attention a week ago that the most traffic coming to her blog came from my Bell Tower blog.

Of course I didn’t know that my wonderful readers came to visit her blog so often!

Today she showed me a screenshot showing exactly HOW much traffic "I" draw her way and I have to say, wow. Then she asked me if I was messing with her…

Of course I am not, but now I’m tempted to do so!

So, my darling readers… Can I persuade you all to take a look here?

http://nightbloominggarden.blogspot.com/

Let me especially recommend that you take a look at “Juniper”… It will really tuck at your heart strings.

Much love to you all!

Igor <3

Today’s hair

Figure 8 bun

First I held it with my favourite sticks but they pulled, pinched and kept getting caught in my neck hair, so I tried with a Flexi. That was a huge success. It felt very stabile!

I should practise this one more often

Q and A

Since it looks like you can’t post comments to Pages, any question to me can be posted as a comment here and I will paste the question and answer it in the Q and A page.

Let’s see if anyone has anything to ask me ;)

 

Answers 

Today’s hair

Another extremely hot and sunny day. The heat gives me a slight headache and whenever I have my hair in a bun, I end up thinking it’s the buns fault and mess with it or take it down. Put my hair in a braid today and still had that annoying headache. Sigh.

I made a fairly uncomplicated braid “with a bit of French” and held it with a elastic matching my blue shirt and a blue headband also matching the shirt and with some white details that fit very nicely with the white print on the front of it.

It felt pretty pedestrian and yet I got two compliments from strangers.

One from an older man while waiting for a friend. He did slightly creep me out but luckily my friend showed up to “save” me. Yay!

Another from a very hard of hearing girl I had problems communicating with (She didn’t speak English and my not-too-good-yet Swedish was too hard for her to understand) She wanted a picture of my braid and I let her take one.

It did make me wonder a bit of my own reactions. Would I have allowed the girl to take my picture if she wasn’t handicapped? Was it that the guy happened to be, well, a guy that creeped me out?

Hmm.

Anyways. I took a picture of the braid. Nothing too interesting about it other than it being so colour-coordinated and the tassel being pretty long. One of the parts ran out of length and I couldn’t be bothered to re-braid it and exchange hairs between the parts.

Yesterday’s hair

Extremely hot and sunny day. I wanted something with a bit of shade for my hair and thought of my old favourite the braided bun with a silk scarf braided into it.

But once I started wrapping it around, it was clear that the scarf alone couldn’t hold it with just the ends tied together. It used to be able to hold the bun up, but not anymore.

Actually that added to my theory that the cinnamon bun had a certain thickness to length ratio where it works. Too much thickness to too little length means you can’t get enough coils to get the self-stabilising effect. Too much length to the thickness and the whole thing starts sliding and unravelling.

Braiding before coiling it around in a bun will make the bun work with more length to less thickness and still give you the self-stabilising effect.

I used to take advantage of that by holding the bun with just the two ends of the scarf tied together. Now I guess it is too long.

Since that didn’t work, I tried to wrap the braid up in a Nautilus. That didn’t work either, but by then I was getting bored with messing with my hair, so I just stuck a black Ketylo through and got on with my day.

New material coming up?

I probably should apologise for not posting more often, but it’s hard to keep the habit up. Having long hair is just such a habit for me that it’s hard to see the “unusual” in it and write my routines down. Its sort of like if I blogged about opening doors or making coffee I guess.

I find it easier to keep the habit up with visiting UTT. There are fun to be found, questions to answer and valued new input.

Last week I printed out a calendar for June and stuck it on my fridge to fill out for every day I go to the gym. It’s very motivating and revealing! Maybe I should do the same with blogging?

Anyways. I got some input from friends in real life and especially liked two suggestions:

A)   A complete beginner’s guide. Nothing fancy, not even for people going for super long lengths, but just for people looking to have healthier hair. I really liked that suggestion. It’s the kind of thing I think would appeal to just about everyone. Even those with “super long lengths” could use a few new thoughts on the basics once in a while too

B)   A page on my non-hair beauty routine. My friend said it because I “claimed I spend less time on my hair than on everything else.” I know she said it mostly in “defiance” since she is a short haired person at heart and will never believe it. But, I do kind of like the idea.

Other than those two, what do you all think? Something I should cover? Something you would like to know? Put up a (F)AQ?

Sock bun

Been feeling stuck in a simple braid to braided Nautilus bun-rut for a while. Not that I really mind, I just don’t always feel like doing something fancy with it. Simple braid to a Nautilus is stabile and comfortable.

Anyways, here is a sock bun with three braids wrapped around

Folded braid

Pretty simple folded up braid from today

I made a Dutch braid and secured with a black elastic, then folded the tail under itself and folded the braid up again. Then secured with 2 black elastics and an expensive Hello Kitty rhinestone elastic I bought once and used like… twice now…

Night time experimentation

Heh, clever title, huh?

We all have our ideas of what we do best and what we do worst for our hair. Those things we have worked out perfectly and those we really need to work on to make better.

My thing that I’m worst at comes to sleeping. I sleep on my sides (and somewhere between side and stomach) and I’m a restless sleeper. This is where people will usually just recommend silk pillow covers and that would fix the problem. But…

Silk freaks me out when I sleep.

There. I wrote it. Yes, it sounds weird. But it does.

It’s like silk just balances that fine line between feeling organic and not feeling organic and the times I have tried to sleep on silk covers, I wake up every time I turn around. Silk just creep me out, even when I’m not conscious. It’s like some primal part of my brain sounds the alarm thinking I have rolled over to rest my head on a slippery snake (And I’m not afraid of snakes) and it will eat me alive.

I don’t know what’s worst and the most annoying: Waking up so often and not getting any real quality sleep or that half a second where the caveman part of my brain has taken over and is telling me to run for my life!

You can’t argue with the results though. Sleeping on silk left my hair practically unruffled even for a restless sleeper. If I just could get used to it, I could really save those fragile temple-hairs from a lot of damage.

The area around the temples has hairs that have a shorter life span than the rest. This is why people start going grey around the temples first. Just like all other cells in the body, the follicles have a certain life span. They can only produce so many “sets” of hair strand before they start breaking down and not function as flawless as before. The follicles will stop producing melanin as efficiently as before and eventually stop putting the melanin in the hair strands layers.

I always thought that on top of the hairs having a shorter life span than the rest of the scalp, they grow more fragile too even when you’re young. But I have never seen any scientific evidence to that, so I guess it will stay my personal suspicion.

I tried with satin: Same deal. I tried with microfiber and wasn’t sure if that was actually better than cotton, sure it feels smoother to touch, but on the microscopic level, is it really? My hair seemed to “stick” to it a lot.

So, smooth pillow cases were kind of out of the question. Of course I guess if I just “soldiered on” for long enough I could get used to it, but that would probably take me a very, very long time. And cost me too much quality sleep.

Then I had the idea of sleeping on the couch and covering the top half of the sheets with silk. Of course that wouldn’t help the hair that would rest on my pillow, but it would be gentler to the hair from my shoulders and down. I tried it and sure, the silk still freaked me out, but not as bad as when it’s touching my face. I still woke up from time to time turning over and touching my naked arms to the smooth fabric.

Of course the problem is making some silk that can cover the entire top half of a king sized bed and not get bunched up from me turning over…

A few nights ago I had the idea of shortening up my braid for sleeping. I sleep with my hair in a braid. If I have my hair in a braid during the day, I completely ignore it all day and then sleep on it. If I have my hair in a bun, I take it down and braid it for night.

A single braid is classic length on me, so it gets caught under my hips when I turn over. By now I have made an unconscious habit out of doing some weird little extra tug/motion thing whenever I turn over in my sleep so I don’t yank my head back. It’s about the same I do when I wear a braid and go sit on a chair: A little shrug with one shoulder so the braid falls in front of me instead of getting caught. In the bed, the little tug doesn’t work 100% though.

Anyways, I looped the end of my braid up to about waist length and secured it with a soft elastic. It worked really well. No more getting the braid caught under my weight. I will keep doing that loop up for sleeping. Maybe combine it with some sort of silk bag-thingie (It’s a technical term!) to protect the ends. No matter what, the loop will be here to stay!

And I really should go hunting for some sort of silk bonnet. It would really save my fragile temple hairs from a lot of rubbing.