Reason #14: art

Tori, hard at work labeling labels. 

Tori wanted dreadlocks from the time she was six years old.  "I was fighting my hair," she told me.  "It was a constant battle of brushing out the tangles."  When she discovered that there was such a thing as dreadlocks, she was enamored.

It was a long time before her dream came true, though.  "I wanted to be in a stable place in my life," she said.  She had her young daughter to think of.  That didn't happen until she secured a job working for a local town, first in the assessor's office and then at the recycling center, where she has taken piles and piles of what seemed to be random crap and organized it into a veritable marketplace of reused materials.

But that's a story for another blog.

The story for this blog is her reason for dreadlocks.

Some of Tori's artsy beads.

"I did it for art," she explained to me.  Sure, not having to comb her hair mattered to Tori, but what really captured her imagination was the artful and pretty things one could do with locks.

Things like putting in decorative beads and bows and strings and things.  Like braiding and tying and dyeing.  Wrapping with wire and doing what inspires.

Tori is fascinated by my nature-vs-nurture dreadlock test, but as a friend and disciple of Soaring Eagle, she is pretty sure she knows how it's going to turn out.  She rattled off a list of ways that wax can ruin locks, and reminded me of how she had wax coming out of hers for over two years after she stopped using the stuff, a tale that I've already recounted here.

Yes, it's crossed my mind to put stuff in my own locks, but no, I am not quite ready to do that.  I don't want beads unnecessarily influencing the development of my locks during this period of testing.  But yes, some of those beads are really pretty!