Hair Changes

Have you ever longed ,just once, to be a bit different? To shrug off the appearance of your daily life and for just a little while live a look that is hidden deep within you?

A look that your friends might envy you for, admire you for being so daring? A look that deep down inside you have been dying to try but common sense and normality kept you from embracing?

To those of you who have always wanted to try but never had the courage let me tell you TRY IT! After all it is just a look, what can go wrong!

If you, like me, secretly admire the hippy look, the alternative abandonment of traditional attire and style, the colours and wonderful miss match of layers, the wild hair!! from dreadlocks, braids, hair dye, beads, ribbons and bows, all of which have their fascination and curious attraction. How do they make it look like that?

Since the family's first holiday abroad where we all had the traditional holiday braid woven into our hair I have craved for more. My daughter fell victim to my craving when she was only nine, by first having her hair braided into about ten ribboned braids for school, then graduating to twenty for a weekend away. Her hair was long and thick and by the time she was eleven I could convince her to sit for a couple of hours while I braided away. Twenty became forty, forty became sixty. By the time she was sixteen I had her hooked. Ninety tiny plates ending in beads adorned her head. Two days of sitting,combing, dividing, oiling, plating, beading. But the look was incredible. All her friends admired her, mothers asked where we had had it done. I proudly told them we had done it ourselves. The local salon said they didn't do that style of braiding and the big salons charged over £60! – this was back in the early nineties when a good cut and blow dry only cost £12.50!

As we progressed in numbers so we progressed in knowledge and expertises. Hair was washed and conditioned to a gloss finish. The traditional nit comb became our ally, Vaseline became our friend and our fingertips became agile and soft! Junk shops were scoured for beaded belts that could be taken apart and bags of tiny elastic bands were gathered from the office shops.

My daughters head became a grid of precision. We began with a centre parting, so straight the Romans would have been proud of us, either side of this, areas were divided into no more than a centimetre square. As each area was segmented away from the next it was smoothed with Vaseline, divided into three and laying the plait slightly into the direction it would eventually fall the twisting plaiting would begin. Half way down, to a point where she could actually see what she was doing, I would hand over the operation to my daughter while I prepared the next centimetre of hair. In symmetry we worked our way along the parting. Each square an exact copy of the last until the first layer was done. Beads, three deep, were threaded onto the end of each plait, the end of hair bent over the last bead and the whole thing secured with the tiny elastic band. The two top beads were then pushed down over the band, hiding it from sight and giving a neat end to the plait.

Having completed the first layer we would move to the next, again working in symmetry. Section, grease, plait, beads, band, end. One layer becomes two and we break for lunch. Two become three and its time for tea! Three becomes for and we do no more – until the next morning that is.

It is a time consuming practice braiding hair but the time spent in total commitment to my daughter as we created her hair braids I will always treasure. The top ups during the following weeks as the hair grew and layer by layer of braids were undone one by one, to be carefully combed through with the nit comb and redone, were special moments but never compared to the intensity of that first creation.

The years have now passed and my daughter has left home, graduated (complete with a head full of braids) from University and moved away.

Still the craving to braid is within me. I tried a single braid in my own hair, then two, four.

Although very long, my hair is much thinner than my daughters incredible thick locks. What we had managed to turn into ninety would barely make twenty braids for me. I struggled to find the solution, then, out of the blue, the answer presented itself!

One evening while sitting at a music concert I studied the girls hair two rows in front of me. Her hair was in fact quite short but she had woven wool and threads into it making it appear slightly longer than shoulder length and wondrously thick. It was twisted up onto the top of her head and pinned with a clasp and what appeared to be a knitting needle! As the concert progressed I studied the back of her head. This was the answer I had been waiting for.

At 47 years of age, I decided it was my turn! My turn to have people turn and look at me in the street, to marvel at the dedication taken to achieve that unique look. I gathered wool from the charity shops, looked for beads in my cupboards and then with the assortment of materials, my trusting nit comb, two mirrors and the new tub of Vaseline I began.

Section, plait, bead, band, end.




Enthused as I was with my discovery in the use of wool I decided to modify the plan a wee bit. I cut six foot long pieces of wool of three different colours, these I folded over the root of what was going to be my new plait and using my actual hair as the third section, began to plait. Once I reached three quarters of the way down, to where my hair ran out, I added to my hair section two strand of wool, one each from the two wool sections.

The last foot of plait was made up of pure wool which I neatly knotted in a simple granny knot. Centimetre by centimetre I crept along the sides of my parting. Symmetry as usual was forefront in my mind. Not only was the hair sectioned into a mirror image of itself but also the colours within the wool were matched side to side. One layer and I rested, two layers and I slept.

The weekend disappeared and work on my hair halted as I returned to work. Compliments abounded from the children in school, customers in the coffee shop marvelled at my dedication, everything I had envisioned became reality. A hair wash mid week proved easy enough, though it did take rather a long time to dry. My swim on the Thursday proved a bit of a challenge too but with the aid of a largish swim hat and some help from the dryer we were soon looking frizz free and tidy.

By the following weekend however, I had lost the initial enthusiasm. I had originally planned on braiding up my entire head, envisioning a swirling mass of colour that could be piled up and fastened with an assortment of clips and pins - but I had run out of time and then, as the days passed, I lost the incentive . That was to be my saving grace!

After three weeks of compliments, hair washes and swims I decided it was time to carefully undo each plate and tighten it up.



Being a woman who has worked with wool in various concepts over the years from weaving to knitting and felting I should have remembered what happens to wool once it is repeatedly washed in hot water with lots of soap and dried with heat – it felts!!!!! These wonderful plaits may only have taken 6 hours to put in but two days later I was still trying to get them out!!

Never ever ever ever again!! I shall dye it purple next time I desire a change or cut it all off but I will never braid it with wool and wash it! No matter how fantastic it looked!

My scalp hurt from all the pulling , my finger tips hurt from all the untangling, and to think I had not only planned to redo them but had thought that, if I was clever, I could use the same wool a second time!!

As I painfully de-tangled each individual inch, I cut it with razor sharp scissors to prevent it from re tangling. By the end of a single plat I was surrounded by an untidy pile of inch long threads of many colours. These I then relinquished to the open fire and watched burn with perverse satisfaction!

It could have been worse I suppose – as I said, I was planning on doing my entire head when I started this project – If I had done the whole of my head I would have shaved it all off by the second day in shear frustration and sworn that minimalism was the latest fashion. I did have to cut it once I finish as I snapped so many ends off in my efforts to remove the wool, it needed levelling off.

Yet I did do it! I embraced the challenge of being unique, of daring to be different, if only for a little while, and it would have worked too, to perfection, if only I hadn't been so enthusiastic about the washing and drying.

The End.