Hair Adventures

I recently had the idea to make hair pieces for myself out of my own hair.  I've been saving the shed strands from my hairbrush to make hair rats for several months now, but I decided to go one step further.  I needed a haircut anyway, and I thought what better use for the strands I would lose than making pre-curled, ready-to-wear resuable hairpieces?  Thus began the Great Experiment!  If I'm successful, I should be able to quickly and easily (after some practice) create elaborate 18th-19th Century hairstyles.

To start with, my hair was very long.

Not the longest it's ever been - in high school I could almost sit on it - but long enough to annoy me.  I was willing to part with up to eight inches for the sake of this endeavor, and I decided to cut it myself rather than try to explain to a hair stylist what I wanted to accomplish.  

First I washed my hair, since it's easier to manipulate when it's wet and I wanted to use gel to set the curls as well.  I parted my hair on the left side like I normally do, brushed it out thoroughly, and combed out a 1" section to start with.

I added gel to get the strands to stay together, and wrapped them around my fingers to create a coil.  

With the ends safely tucked inside the curl, I simply needed to cut it from the rest of the strand.

I was a little nervous about this first one!

But I bit the bullet.

Ahhhhh!  

Next I added more gel to "glue" the cut ends to the rest of the coil.

Then I applied a bobby pin to keep everything held together until dry.

And continued with the rest of my hair.  I kept a small spray bottle of water handy in case the strand I was working on had dried out too much, and just repeated the same process all around my head.

Before long I had eighteen individual curls.  Hooray!

And shockingly, my haircut didn't turn out horrible!  I had anticipated a quick trip to a hair salon in order to fix my mangled tresses, but this turned out to be unnecessary.  I had managed to cut off the same amount of hair all the way around, with just a bit of shorter gradation towards the front.

So now all that's left to do is to test my new hairpieces!  I should have several opportunities to do so in the next few months.  Stay tuned for updates on my hair adventures!

And yes, I am aware that I have the nerdiest pajamas ever.  :p