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.

Out and about

Fifteen days in, and I found the perfect storm for bringing my young locks out in public again:

• It was a (mostly) sunny day
• There was a rock festival at the local college
• My hair needed a chance to air dry

I just rewaxed most of my locks last night, so palmrolling them into a spiky mace-head was a snap.  If you're going to rock a hairstyle, then rock it well, I say.

Keep on dreadin' in the free world!

I felt good about going out in public, because I appraised my dreads last night and found them to be coming along nicely.  I removed the rubber band at the base of each one, because they had all rolled up away from the scalp and I wanted to reposition them anyway.  As I said, there wasn't any wax in most of them, so I was able to check out how much locking was going on in there.  Most of them have good, strong dreading going on in the vicinity of the rubber band, so moving it up closer to the scalp should only help things along.

The hair has already opened up conversations I hadn't had before.  I ran into a local elected official, who told me that she'd once had dreads herself, and showed me the one lock she'd made a few days ago around the back of her head.  (This isn't the first time I've seen a woman sporting a lock or three back there - I think it's some kind of dread mullet, professional in front, party in the back.)  She's got some amount of skill at backcombing, because the one lock was pretty solid.

She was impressed that I've only had them for fifteen days.  We talked about backcombing (she complimented my wife), about wax (she uses it sometimes, mostly for smoothing when she's dressing up, and didn't know that there's a wax controversy), we talked about clockwise rubbing, and she showed me a dread ball that she'd made.  

Some of those concepts - clockwise rubbing and dread balls in particular - I haven't talked much about because they work best when there's little or no wax in there.

• Clockwise rubbing is used to train new hairs to join the existing locks.  Hair follicles have a cycle of growth, followed by dormancy, after which they push out the old hair and start growing a new one.  The clockwise rubbing at the base of the lock catches these new hairs up in the lock.
• Dread balls are used to capture the loose, flyaway hairs (of which I have many) and grow them into a dread.  The idea is to take a few loose hairs that are nearest to one particular lock, and roll the tips together until they form a tangled knot.  That knot, the dread ball, gets crocheted into the lock.

Based on her assessment, I am considering moving on from the "always have wax in your locks" phase to the "every other week" phase.  That calls for alternating a week of dread balls and clockwise rubbing to form knots with a week of waxing to hold them together as they lock.  I'll reassess next time I wash my hair.

One day in . . .

Today I have bits of hair sticking to a light sheen of wax on my fingertips.  It means that every time I touch my nose I tickle it with some tiny hair, or fiber from my hat or sweater.  There is just enough wax on them to make the surface slightly sticky, accumulated from palmrolling my day-old dreadlocks.

Step 1:  section the hair

Yesterday, Earth Day, was a lot longer than I expected it to be, and completely exhausting.  My good wife set to sectioning my hair at about 1 in the afternoon, and we finished the final step of blow-drying the newly-waxed locks after eight.  We did have breaks for meals and such, but all told it was a solid six hours worth of work.

I expected it to take less time because my hair is on the short end of the range, but that actually made it take longer, for two reasons:

1. the learning curve was spread over more locks, and
2. there's a lot less hair to lock, so it takes more backcombing to get it together.

To expand, there's always a few "learning dreads" which aren't as tight as they could be, and have to be rebackcombed.  This is already sounding technical, so here's less than two minutes of video on backcombing to explain it:

The example of the ideal dread is all fine and dandy, but keep in mind that the first inch or more of each lock is not tangled, and won't look like that; my locks are all about three inches long each so that gives you about two inches of learning per lock, and those are tough inches since the poof percentage is elevated by the percentage of root hair.  We were three-quarters through my head when my wife said, "I think I'm starting to understand how this works," meaning that her tactile sensitivity to textiles was kicking in.

Agony above,
serenity below

One thing that was exactly as expected was the pain of having that done to every single square inch of my head.  Oh.  My.  God.  Maybe dreadlocks are like tattoos and childbirth (I've experienced the former and heard about the latter) in that you forget how agonizing the process is after you're through it and recall it through the hazy delirium of endorphins, but I don't think so.

The reason why is that I am going to have regular reminders of how much dreading sucked as they mature.  I get to do the palmrolling, and the clockwise rubbing, and the squeezing them dry when they're wet.  None of these things actually hurts much, but my brutalized scalp reacts to my touch the way Tina would to Ike's, and it all comes back to me again day after day.

Don't dread having a cat in your lap.

My friend Amanda Catherine told me that they'd by "spiky," and she wasn't kidding.  When I first saw what they looked like, before I put in any wax, I thought that they were being supported by rubber bands at the bases, but such was not the case.  Poofy, erect stalks covering my head, bringing forth images of electrocution caused by a game of "Truth or Dare" gone wrong.

The waxing took most of another episode to complete (we watched a couple each of "Buffy," "Xena," and "Jack and Bobby," and one of "Sliders" as well).  After I warmed it and worked it in, Robin took the blow dryer to it so it would melt and really get in there. The heat was enough on my inflamed scalp to make me gnash my teeth and rend my clothing, which is why I'm glad I was wearing a high-quality sweater from L.L. Bean, for it was quite resistant to rending.

I tried only briefly to put my beloved took on over this new head of mine before giving up.  The tam fit, but I put it on and removed it gingerly, since the locks are probably even more fragile that most new locks are.  Today I stabilized my locks more, and to my amazement got the took on over my Styracosaurus self.

The stabilization started with putting rubber bands at the base of each lock, in addition to the ones at the tips. This compresses the base just enough that I can get some results from palmrolling, which is the same motion used to make a snake out of clay.  With the wax in there, palmrolling compresses the lock and helps it stay that way as the locks tighten.  My regimen for the next month is going to be daily palmrolling of each lock, and adding a little bit of wax to the locks that don't have any left in them.  I think I already have a couple like that, but I'm paranoid about overwaxing so I'm going to wait a day.

As the sun sets on my hair's first dreadful day, I have a low-grade headache and feel like I'm wearing a constant state of surprise.  I may venture out this evening and see where my hair takes me.  Perhaps tomorrow I'll talk about the mental toll all that pain takes, unless I decide that I'm whining too much.

Today's the day!

Yep, I have chosen Earth Day as my locks' birthday.  I need to take one more before picture, to capture the moment for all time.

Then I'm going to wash my hair with dread shampoo and figure out how big I want 'em to come out.  This can get complicated, but these tips on sectioning for dreadlocks say I should be aiming for bundles of hair about the diameter of a pencil, which will make slightly thicker locks.  We will figure out how big the sections need to be.  It ranges from about half an inches to two inches for each square, and my hair is thick so I expect that about an inch per square will be about right. I want my locks to be consistent in thickness because it will look nicer and they will mature at the same rate.

Then I will squirt a bit of locking accelerator on them before the backcombing begins.

Crap, I need to figure out what we should watch on TV while we're doing this!

Got my dread kit!

Supa Dupa Dread Kit + Lock Peppa

I got my Supa-Dupa Dread Kit in the mail today (well, yesterday), exactly when it was promised.  Here's what I got in the box, which includes the kit and one add-on product:  dreading comb, dread wax, dread shampoo, lock accelerator, and Lock Peppa.  That last one is the product I added onto the kit.

So far, so good:  I was promised the kit in 5-7 days and got it in 6.  Everything I ordered was in the box.  Nothing was broken, there wasn't any unnecessary packaging, and there was absolutely nothing else in the box - they sent me an email, and I like that they didn't print the invoice out, too.

Dreading comb

The dreading comb is the crux of this entire adventure.  It's the tool that makes this a process of cultivation, rather than simply allowing it to grow wild.  My head's going to be an English garden, not an old-growth forest.

Backcombing can technically be done with any comb, but if it's not metal it's probably not going to hold up without breaking.  I'll be writing a lot more about backcombing, the technique which my team is going to use for the locking.

Dread shampoo

In terms of PR, I think the dread shampoo and its tag line ("dread don't have to be dirty") is top priority.  Not only is it possible to wash dreadlocks, it's a really good idea.  Good washing and drying practice helps the lock tighten up and keeps them healthy.  However, ordinary shampoo will do anything but.

Commercial shampoo has a whole lot of crap in it, crap that doesn't get rinsed out of locks the way it does out of "straight" hair.  (When you're talking dreadlocks, "straight" is hair which isn't locked.)  When I popped the top on this bottle, I didn't smell a blessed thing.

Dread wax

The wax is something that I'll use a lot of early on, and eventually not need at all.  You have to put a whole lot of in the new dreads, but re-waxing doesn't happen until there's none left in a particular lock.

DreadHeadHQ calls its wax Dread Butta.  The stuff is slightly yellowish (can you say "waxy yellow buildup?") and doesn't have any particular odor.  It has about the same consistency as coconut oil does at room temperature.

Locking accelerator is a product that's supposed to help the locks form.  It comes in a powder in this bottle, which has to be filled with water to whip the stuff up.

Not entirely sure what this stuff is supposed to do, but I'm going to make some kind of mass-instruction list about what to use when and how and maybe even why, so I can keep it all straight, which will hopefully keep my hair from staying that way.

I don't think there's much to be said about the elastic bands, although the kit came with 50 more than promised, which is cool.  Overdelivering makes good marketing sense.  The bands are black, which is especially stylish.  They're going to help keep the locks separated as they mature.  Natural dreads merge and separate over time, but I'm not going for that effect right now.

How long to dread?

Even though I've made up my mind to dread, I'm still pondering if my hair is ready or not.  In some ways it's readier than anyone's, but it may literally fall short, or come close.

Hair with texture, before shower

I've been washing my hair using a non-residue natural shampoo that I make at home, and instead of conditioner I use a vinegar rinse.  I avoid putting a hat on when it's damp, but I've worn my took throughout this long, cold winter.  When it got really goddamned cold, I put on hat on over it when I went out.  I haven't brushed my hair since last summer . . . I'm going to say certainly August 2010, but probably sometime in July.

I think it's safe to say that my hair has texture, as evidenced by these before-and-after-shower pictures.  In the first, I pulled my took off and simply photographed exactly what I saw in the mirror.  The second picture is after I have towel-dried my hair.

Hair with texture, after shower

Where I may lack is in length.  Most sources I find online suggest a 4-6 inch minimum for my hair, because while it has texture and definitely can dread, it lacks the kink factor which makes it possible to lock hair when it's as short as an eighth of an inch, so it's claimed.

When I was a young man, I had more than 18 inches of hair, and I pulled it back into a ponytail for about a week straight, discovering the natural method for locking hair.  I never completed the process, but it tells me that I can probably get away with something closer to 4 inches, and I'm reasonably sure I've got at least 5 all around.

The main advantage of locking the hair when it's shorter is that it will take less time for my dreadful friends to help me.  The backcombing process can take six hours for 18 inches of hair, and is painful and tiring.

On the other hand, it also means less time to practice, so there won't be any really mythic dreads.

On the other other hand, my hair is going to take more maintenance in the first months to get it to lock.  Longer hair simply stays put better.

Ultimately I like shifting most of the work onto my own shoulders, since I will also reap most of the rewards, whatever they shall be.