Great balls of dread!

It may not look like much, but this dread ball is huge.

I made my first dread ball today, and I'm stoked.  It may look underwhelming in the picture, but this is a big step towards bringing my locks into line and making them behave like the hairy snakes they are. I know, I got some splainin' to do.

When we sectioned and backcombed my hair, every effort was made to get all the hairs into one lock or another.  But . . .

• . . . my hair is pretty short, so some probably slipped out right away.
• . . . the locks started out quite loose, so a few worked their way out.
• . . . my healthy scalp is pushing out new hairs all the time, and a lot of them just don't know about the new hair plan yet.

So there's a lot of hairs just kinda wandering around out there, not sure what's going on because they don't have any little follicle friends pointing them in the right direction.  It's creating a fuzzy little halo, a corona of wispy fibers shooting out from my head, catching the sun as I go through my day.

The way to give these hairs a home is to make a little dread ball, a tangle that I can slip up inside one of the locks so that it all tightens up together.  This is the how-to I'm using:

Since I've been thinking about backing off wax, I've been feeling around for these hairs when I'm tired of palmrolling.  In the video, Jonny says that locating and separating the loose hairs is the difficult part, but I don't have any trouble on that step.  Maybe it's because my hair's still fairly short.

Where I was stuck was making the dread ball itself.  I wasn't serious enough to get out the Lock Peppa mentioned in the video (it came with the kit I ordered, and there's plenty left), but I was annoyed that I couldn't start to catch the hairs together without the stuff.

Credit the dream-state for my success.  As I awoke slowly, I remembered that you have to bend the hair over as you're rolling it, and I tried doing it that way. Before I was fully awake I had the dread ball you see above.

My wife is confident she can get as much action out of a crochet hook as she can from a proprietary loose hair tool, so we're going to pick one up.  If she wasn't already very good with fiber arts and needlework I'd want to get one of the specialized tools, but I'm confident she won't do more harm than good.