Friday, July 18, 2008

The Good, The Bad and The Latching

Just when I thought that I had settled into the perfect combination of latching and palm rolling I realized that I had to revamp some things. See I live in Houston, TX where the summers are hot as hell and very very humid which makes having shoulder length thick locks sometimes be a pain in the butt! Don't get me wrong I love my locks but this is the longest and thickest that my hair has ever been in my entire life so learning to deal with it has been a little different for me. With that said, I love to swim and I work out so that means that the palm rolling isn't really giving me as much time in between retwists as the latching is giving me. Since I've been latching from the crown of my head to the nape area it has made a dramatic difference in my retwist time from palm rolling my entire head, but I am finding that I am having to retwist the front every few days to maintain the level of neatness that I like and we all know the damage and weakness that over-twisting can do to the rootbed so I am left looking like I have a 2-3 inch afro with dreads sticking out and I hate hate hate that look!!! So last weekend I latched my entire head for the first time and I feel that I did a very good job as far as catching all the little stray hairs that I could to achieve the neat fuzzless look of the palm roll and while I am proud of the job I did, I find that I dont have the same level of personal satisfaction as I do when I palm roll the front. My baby hairs lay down for a while and I have the shine on the palm rolled new growth areas and it just looked so smooth laying on my forehead, and now I have my curly beady beets on my hair line, long stray hairs that didnt want to be latched and I have a perpetual 'halo of fuzz' surrounding my head! Yea I'm still cute and rocking my locks, but I guess I just have to get use to this fuzz which is something that I havent really had to deal with so much when I palm roll. But the palm roll cannot handle my swimming and workout habits nor can it deal with the level of humidy that we have in Texas so I am going to take the suggestion of one of my fellow group members and do a straw/roller set on my locks and see if that hides the HOF 'halo of fuzz' and lets me enjoy my locks again. I will document my experiment with the set and share pics.
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What started this journey...

My journey started on June 16, 2005 on what will always be known as the worst hair day of my knatural borne life and the day I made the best decision of my life. My 3 year old afro was not acting right and wasn't showing any signs of acting right soon. I brushed, plaited, twisted, oiled, washed, wrapped up and puffed, but all to no avail, when my BSF said the words I'll never forget. "Why don't we just lock up? I mean, you've been talking about it, and if you do it then I'll do it with you." Priceless words. Well, once we decided that we immediately went online, did our research and figured out how we were going to start them and with what product. I started my 4-5in. locks with two strand twist, using ORS lock and twist gel. You can view my journey at http://www.fotki.com/TheCurlyOne/ and see photos from before I started locking up until a few months ago. My regime has stayed pretty consistant over the years and that requires me to do a retwist every 3 to 4 weeks. I'll do a touch up on the front locks if I want to go an extra week without doing a full retwist. I'm currently palmrolling but I am research the nappy locs too to see how latching feels for me. I'd like to latch the back and continue to palm roll the front because I love the coiled retwist look that you don't get from the latch method. I'm coming upon my 3 year lockaversary and I want to do something special to my locks. A straw or roller set using pipe cleaners will probably be the next style that I attempt. I have everything I need I just have to actually sit down and do it.