The Dread Journey

When I started out this whole journey for dreads I had a massively different idea of what I was going to end up with.  I just knew I needed something different and easier to maintain.  I wanted something fun and unique.  I wanted something that was, well, me!  The whole journey of dreads was about doing something for myself.  It was about becoming something beautiful.  It was about doing something fun for me.

The first dreads were exactly what I wanted, soft, wooly, and a beautiful white color.  I spent hours hand-felting each one and hanging them up to dry.  We spent even more time installing them into my hair.  The whole process was quite an ordeal.  I expected this would be the end of it.  It would be that simple.  My hair was going to dread from those and it would be done.  My journey with dreads was over, and now just came the fun part of waiting and watching them grow.

For about a month everything went well.  I lost a dread here and there, but they were easy enough to install again.  The dreading was coming undone, but most of them were fine.  There were a few modifications, like the thinning out of the bangs and the splitting of a few dreads, but for the most part, that was it.  It was a month where I didn't need to spend more than a few minutes on my hair each day.  It saved me so much time and energy!

After the first month, things suddenly went downhill.  After just one shower (the time the previous dreads each fell out), I lost fifteen dreads!  I found a couple later that would have likely fallen out by the next shower if I hadn't gotten to them.  I had been so meticulous before about checking for broken elastics that I didn't expect such a massive loss all at once.  I had been checking for broken elastics!  This had never happened before.  It was time to make a painfully difficult decision.

My conclusion was to take all of the dreads out and just start over.  I would dread the hair, wait for it to mature, then felt the wool dreads back in.  The system wouldn't have been too bad.  It actually sounded pretty easy!  I went to work dreading, only to find that the sectioning was so incredibly crazy in some areas that it just wasn't going to work.  With the help of a friend, it was all torn out, dreading, woolies, and all.  It was a truly sad day.  I feel like I lost a piece of myself.

It took about a week before I was able to get back to my hair.  I had been given a couple bleach kits from a friend of mine.  I'd pulled out some old dye that I'd been hanging on to for a while.  I was going to go crazy with my hair, and then we'd dread it and put the woolies back in.

Bleaching my hair was interesting, as always.  We decided to bleach my boyfriend's hair as well so he can dye it a bright copper red.  Between the two of us, it was a day of lots of bleach and lots of dye!  I didn't realize quite how much hair I actually had until we were putting the bleach in.  It actually took more than one bleach kit to cover all the hair I needed to!  It's a good thing we decided to do my boyfriend's hair too!  I never expected short hair would take so incredibly much!  It seemed to take forever to bleach too.  I was terrified that my hair would be so dry and damaged that I wouldn't dare dread it.  Thankfully, everything seemed to turn out alright.  My hair wasn't completely fried as I feared it might be.

After that I showered and I set to dying again.  Normal people actually section the hair they want for each color, are careful not to mix dyes, and all of that.  That's not what I did!  I grabbed a section of my forelock and slapped in some blue.  Then I smeared some pink down the hair at the sides of my face.  These would be my bangs, or fringe, depending on where you live.  Then I went through the rest of it with purple.  I went back to get any little missed spots.  The dyes mixed a bit.  Nothing was exactly as it should have been.  I wasn't even sure it was even!  I didn't care!  I just knew how it needed to be, and that was how it would be.  I really felt like an artist in that moment.  It was an incredibly freeing moment of self-expression, of creativity.  I didn't hold myself back with expectations of perfection or anything of the like.  I didn't care if dyes mixed.  I was using my hair as a canvas, and no matter how it turned out, it would be beautiful!  You can actually see my carelessness in the photo to the left.  I got it all over my face in the process.  That's what you get when you just smear dye!

Washing it all out, I was quite pleased with the result.  I was given compliments on how incredibly even they were considering I just kind of went by gut instinct, not even by eye.  I was shocked at the incredible brightness of it all, the beauty.  It was everything I expected and a million times more.  I'd loved the white for the pure enlightening feeling it gave me, but white was just simple and pure.  This is wild, vibrant, and colorful!  This is the way an artist's hair should be!  This is the way an artist should be able to live!  It's self-expression in one of it's truest forms!

When I saw my hair, I was totally thrilled.  I felt more myself than I had in years.  No matter what color hair I've had, it's never felt quite as right as this slap-dash job of throwing dye in my hair in a crazy and chaotic manner.  It was beautiful.  Even leaving it to dry in whatever way it naturally fell (as you can see to the right), it just did it's own thing.  I have to admit, it kind of left me with a butch feeling, my short hair flying around in a boyish chaos.  It wasn't really what I wanted.  I had to keep reminding myself that my hair is still short.  It will still grow.  I had to remind myself that even the most feminine of women have their moments lacking femininity.  Short hair can be whatever you want it to be, all depending on what you do with it.  If I gave it the right style, I could have been happy with that hair style even without dreads!  Still, I had an idea I was going for and I couldn't wait to see it in practice.  I wanted my dreads back!

My friend came over not long after the dye job was done.  We attacked my hair with a blow dryer (well, I did while she watched...drying short hair is really a one person job...) and then we got ready to section.  As we'd learned before, working on dreads while children are present gets challenging, especially when our two families combine.  We knew we were in for it, which is why we decided not to get too ambitious.  We were just sectioning.  As she sectioned, I started dreading as much as I could without getting in the way.  I was rather surprised at the kind of progress we made, but we didn't get finished.  There just wasn't enough time.  I had to run off to dance class!  We did the best we could to get all the sections kept neatly where I wouldn't lose any of our hard work.  I must have looked pretty wild running around with lots of little clumps of hair, a few dreads, and some wild pigtails.  I actually think the look is kind of cute!  Were it more maintainable, I might have thought to keep it that way!

Complete with crazy hair I went, danced, and then went back to her house to finish up the sectioning.  We made some pretty good progress!  77 sections were completed that day and 51 dreads!  I just had 16 left for the morning, and then I would be done!  Of course, by morning my arms were exhausted.  My boyfriend actually stepped up and did the last 8 of them for me while we watched Taboo in our dining room.  By the end of it I looked like a crazy lady because the dreads simply wouldn't relax!  It's got to be all those elastics.  I have to admit, I kind of like the hair sticking up everywhere.  It's kind of crazy, wild, and punk!  You can tell the hair I sleep on because it's all compacted down on the sides, a lot less poofy than the rest of it.  I'm sure it will all relax down in time and look a whole lot more normal!  I'm also going to be busting the elastics out of the ends in a few days after the hair has really had a chance to settle in.  Probably a couple weeks after that I'll be busting the elastics out of the roots.  Then my dreads will just do whatever they naturally want to do, aside from maintenance, of course!  I want my dreads to be well manicured and beautiful.  I want them to be something I can be proud of.  That's going to mean a lot of work over time, but thankfully not the kind of work that beautiful loose hair takes!  I'm definitely over that phase of my life!

Now I'm throwing on a bandanna though.  It was cold without the woolies to keep me warm.  I don't want to put them in until I'm sure all of the excess dye has been bled out of my hair.  I don't want my hair sticking straight up either.  It's not an image thing.  It's just cold.  Having that much exposed scalp certainly doesn't help keep me warm!  I now the dreads will thicken over time and there will be less exposed scalp to freeze.  I know they'll be beautiful as they mature, getting more and more beautiful with each passing day.  Some day they'll stop doing their crazy stand on end thing, and by then it will probably be summer when I'd most wish they would!  For now, this is my dread's first day of life, the day before my anniversary with my boyfriend.  This whole process has really been a journey, an ordeal all it's own.  I can only imagine that with time it will continue to be a journey as my dreads mature and develop their own personality.  I'm excited for that future!  It seems like it truly is a bold, new day.  I can't wait to see what the future has to hold!