Happy New Year!

It's 2014!!

Here is a Summary of my holiday hair prep and how it all turned out :)

Prep- big huge twists left to dry.  Wetline extreme gel and hairveda almond glaze.

 I had a lot of shrinkage and wanted bigger hair for my new years dress so I used my flat iron on 300 to stretch it out.

 

Then I had this kinda high neck dress so I wanted it big, but it looked kinda better up.  I decided on a half and half type of style :)

And a few picts of the night :)

Hope you all are staying warm and enjoying 2014 thus far.  Sorry for the brevity of words vs the onslaught of pictures.  I was like let me just get these up before it's about to be February lol.

Twist and Go?

I've been doing my hair at night lately and calling it a "wash and go" even though I do all sorts of extra stuff to it. lol.  Not just the "dingle coils" but like big huge twists left to begin drying overnight. Most of the time they don't come anywhere close to drying, but sometimes... sometimes they semi dry at the root and ends.  And I get this twistout/wash & go hybrid.

 

But this is how it starts. Ha. My soaking wet, sectioned, freshly washed and detangled hair.  I use a light leave in, lately just some Infusium to coat my hair thoroughly, and then I go through each section with a small palmful of castor oil.

THEN here is the fun part.  I open each twist back up and work in a generous amount of WetLine extreme gel, using my fingers to smooth it through.  I then retwist and move on to the next section.  I don't really consider it a twist out because the twists are so monstrously huge, and only dry about 30%.  When I take them out, it's very much like shaking out a wash & go, but the roots are a little dry, so the direction the hair falls is set.

The pictures below are from the end of the next day.  When i first take the twists apart, I just kind of shake them loose.  They are wet enough that my hair still has a lot of movement and thus a lot of shrinking to do.  A LOT of shrinking :)

 

I'm happy to report that with the hold of the gel, this set lasts a week solid with little tangling. I just sleep on my silk pillow case, and sometimes put it in a ponytail.

A Twistout

I have not done a twistout in a long time and having gotten a little bored with my wash&goes = Ta-da! Time to revisit.

I twisted it wet with KMF gel, castor oil and KMF mistreated conditioner as my leave in.

Of coarse it was not dry in the morning so I had to wear my ropey twists to work. I decided to put them into an updo.  I used pins and just made circles all over my head.  The front two twists were dry so I took those apart and looped them backwards... like so... (I wish you could hear how I just said that in my head lol)

So then I took them apart that evening and I was a bit disappointed.  They were super tight and the ends were not uniform.

SO I took them apart very carefully and didn't separate them many times, trying to keep the frizz down, since then ends weren't coming apart cleanly.

So still meh... It was unwieldy and the shape wasn't quite right. I decided to use my blow dryer to streatch it out and I used gel on the worst of the ends to get them back under control.

So I kinda fixed it :-) I was able to enjoy it for a few days. But ultimately the inconsistency of the pattern and the ends took over. By day 3 it was pretty done for :-(

I'd have to make the twists smaller, and I have to re-examine the KMF gel for twists.  It really takes the volume out of them by removing most of the frizz factor, then the frizz that does exists looks inconsistent.

All said, I prefer my wash and go coils better, and its much faster to set it with gel and just let my pattern do what it does.  However I do want to maintain my ends this summer to keep some length for once.  I'll have to figure out some more styling options like this one.