hello.. i was on here a few years ago as knottykate? i believe that was it. anyways, after having my dreads for 18 months i decided to brush them out in november last year. i really needed a change, and those puppies had been with me through so much, after i combed them out it really felt like so much baggage had been buried. i wanted to share my experience during and post dreading to just sort of add to several discussions, like wax residue staying in dreads FOREVER and damage caused by crocheting. i should probably mention that i occasionally crocheted them and never palm rolled or anything, which i really which i had, just to keep them sort of straight? i have naturally fine, wavy hair (i'm white). a little history on my previous set... i backcombed them, used wax for the first two months in ridiculous quantities. i mean, like 1/3 of the jar was gone in two months. after i found these forums i just stopped using it, yeah my first wash to start of my waxlessness was pretty vigorous but i didn't try to boil it out or anything, no special rinses etc. those dreads were... well, they had been forgotten about. they had been set loose to just go nuts and create crazy hairlines (i had many little dreads on the front and sides and like, six huge short ones on the back) and massive congos and all sorts of fun stuff, which is great for lots of people - i happen to love a congo or two, they're kind of 'pet' dreads in a way, special ones you love more for being so silly and fun - but it wasn't a great look for me. i started tearing in half, even in thirds, fatter mishapen dreads and managed to increase my count from 32 to 41 in about two weeks. the results were almost baby like dreads that knotted up super fast. anyways, time went on, my dreads looked great, over last summer i rinsed them with about twenty bags of chamomile tea boiled in a large pot of water and rinsed over my head a bunch once a week, and dried them in the sun to get cute blonde tips, just for fun. towards the end of my dreads i noticed that they were just INCREDIBLY dry, like harsh to the touch, scraping on me. i hated it, they became itchier than ever and stopped being fun. i blame my shampoo choice for this, i used Neutrogena's Residue Free shampoo (and YES, i'm super aware that it's full of chemicals, it was the cheapest and most effective option i'd found and really didn't seem to hurt my dreads until the very end) which i probably should have watered down. in the end it took me about a week of five to six hours a night to comb them out, and 3 1/2 family sized bottles of intense conditioner. okay, here's the real kicker - the only crap that came out with the matted hair was what appeared to be lint. that's it. and at no point did the comb out feel inhibited by some foreign material like wax, just crazy mean knots. anyhow, i just finished putting in my new set today. took me 15 hours by myself for 55 dreads, evenly distributed. no wax, backcombed and crocheted, bands bobbed on the roots. i've never heard of someone making dreads with no wax off the get go, besides natural advocates, so if someone would like to throw two cents in about their experience, go nuts. i'm hoping that this thread can be a bit of an experimental one where i'm the guinea pig coming back after many lessons learned. pictures have been taken, i'll throw them up when my computer decides to cooperate with my camera's software. thanks for reading! any advice is welcome! EDIT:: sorry for such a novel... i tend to ramble.
It has been suggested that crocheting results in scratchy dreads as it leave tiny little studs of hair sticking out the dreads at right angles which are too short to ever get incorporated. Also welcome back
I did mine 6 months ago the same way you did yours, minus the crochet they started to dread on their own at the 4th month, all maintenance I do is ripping when they want to form a congo. I also have curly/wavy hair which I think has sth to do with the fact that most of my dreads started to lock up from the tip anyway, good luck with this set!
thank you, it's good to have my dreads back. feels like the real me, not like the friggin princess hair i had inbetween. actually, that makes so much sense haha! my dreads kind of had a barbed wire look to them if you got in really close.. not sure why i would get flack for my methods.. other than perhaps the elastics but they're coming out tomorrow. oh and if anyone was curious, before combing them out my longest dread was probably like a foot long, and after combing my hair was at least 2 feet long, everywhere.
k, here's some photos. hopefully they aren't way too huge. before hand, freshly washed. and the next day, after finishing them all! and "down" please excuse my terrible messy table, totally went nuts with the sewing machine that morning. so yeahh. that's them.
more pictures! woo. these are after the first wash, which happened a little sooner than i was hoping, but now i feel super duper clean! and this is me yesterday playing on the sea wall with some statues sorry if they're super big... does anyone know how i can make them smaller? i'm going to keep this up to have something to refer to as a timeline, just fyi.
Did someone make a bunch of pink statue's taking dumps? Or preparing for a unorganized violent game of leap frog?
I liked em, and monks make a little more sense. But I still like the leapfrog idea. And congrats on the new set by the way.:2thumbsup:
thanks, i'm amped. they're not even a week old and they have a nice bit of core knots going on. and yeah leapfrog would be sweet, kind of a battle royale, everyone jumps and whoooa.
I like them. You look so wild with dreads. I'm learning to be patient right now. I cut my hair short. When it's past my shoulders again i'll leave it alone and let it dread itself.
fresh out of the shower! six days old! i know. mirror photos are crazy lame, but the boyfriends out of town and i just want to keep this up! also, i pretty much LIVE in that blue hoodie and vest combo, totally feel weird in something else. i have a lot of time to kill right now waiting for school to start and working 12 hours a week, so sorry if this is a little much. thank you! when i read that i thought "like a lion?" for some reason this seems like a complement haha.
