Making It Work

This week has been a big ball of stress. Well manages stress, but stress nonetheless.

It started with that heifer Hurricane Irene that knocked out my power as I was prepping appetizers for a birthday dinner for a friend. Irene also knocked out my cable and internet and, 7 days later, I am still without it. So for the past week, I have had to drive in to work as opposed to being working at home as normal.  While I have power and finally have my phones back, the lack of internet and TV is bugging the mess out of me!!!  I’m not one of those people who is unaware of how much I depend on my TV. I am aware of how much TV I watch and I know why I do it, so I am exceptionally peeved that I have not been able to relax after work and watch TV for a couple of hours for the last 7 days. Add to that having to drive into work for the past 5 days. Gas-traffic-pedestrians-oh my! And while I miss the people I worked with in the office, I do not miss the office environment at all.

Anyway, I could continue to vent about that situation but that is not the focus of this post for today. Today’s post is about making it work. “It” being my hair this week. So, on to that: The benefit of working at home is that I have not had to put my hands in my hair daily & had plenty of time for trials and plenty of time to correct any errors I've made in execution of styles. Thank goodness because I needed those experiences to lean on for this week. I have also come to the conclusion that I have been doing a lot of protective styling on my hair and, hello, its summer! This is the time of year I can wear my ends out without risking much damage to them. So, my choice of style for this week has been a variation of a flat twist-out.

What I did was an off center part and had 3 somewhat chunky flat twists going to the left on the left side of my head, two going to the back on the right front side of my head and four flat twists going down across the back of my head, leaving the crown out. At the crown of my head I had from 8-10 two strand twists. This was the result:

Here’s the view from the back.  Okay, can I take a minute and marvel at the difference in color between my processed ends and my natural hair!!! That’s going to be just a memory in a little while. Excuse the fuzzitude of the hair. This pic was taken today...day 6 of this style.

So, my goal for this week was to make my hair work, no matter what happened. The first few days were okay because the products in my hair were new/fresh, it had been freshly washed and hadn't been messed with too much. Days 4 and 5 were a little bit of a challenge because some of the ends were fuzzy (see the pic from the back taken at the end of the workday on day 6). To maintain it from day to day I put a little water in my hair from my trusty spray bottle, then retwisted the hair each night and rolled the twists on cold wave/perm rods. In the middle of the week I added a little more foam wrap to help the processed ends continue to follow the directions of the rods. Making the hair work was a success! I'm happy with the results and I received so many compliments from coworkers and friends about how healthy and nice my hair looked.

Products used for this style: Shea Moisture Curl Enhancing Smoothie, Jane Carter Wrap and Roll, African Pride (I think) Nature's Shine Oil (used daily on hands while untwisting), Water and light EVOO (for retwisting at night).

I made sure after applying the Shea Moisture that it was fully distributed into the hair and showing no white residue before applying the Wrap and Roll. If you don't do that, the white color of the product will not fade and will be held in your hair by the Wrap and Roll. The result was the best flat twist out I have ever had, with both moisture and hold in the hair and I was able to separate the sections for the two strand twists without losing the crinkle of the natural hair and without frizzing the processed ends. Definitely will be used again...especially if I still don't have internet next week and have to venture back into the main office. *gag me*

I will try to post a pic of the pre-bed hair so you can see what I did at night.

Peace!