I had an epic night last night. Not epic as in amazing, just epic as in the normal sense of the word. Seven hours of hard, painstaking and sometimes painful work to put dreadlocks into the hair of one of my friends.
He's been growing his hair for a few months and I remember a while back I said I would do his dreads for him but I'm pretty sure I meant it in jest. when I got back to town I offered again not really expecting him to take me up on the offer. Then a couple of days ago he said he wanted them doing so we arranged it for last night. Having never done a full head of dreads from scratch I tried to overestimate the time and said about 6 hours. How wrong I was.
I went round at about midnight and he had just had a shower so we had to wait for his hair to dry. I explained some rules before I started that Winter had laid down for me... No wax, that is cheating and not proper dreadlocks. No shaving them off or taking them out in any way for a long long time, this is a big commitment. You have to name your fatty dread, it's not normally intentional to do a fatty it just kind of happens but it must have a name (FYI I don't have enough dreads for there to be a fatty but my favourite dread is called Patrick, as in Spongebob and Patrick). You have to learn to look after them, all the work that goes into them it's a shame for them to come out...
Rules laid down and we began at about 12.30am... The first one was a bit skinny, I had underestimated how much hair would need to go into the dread but for my first ever attempt at a dread with no prior work it came out pretty darn good. It wasn't the most comfortable of situations, I had made him sit on the floor and I was on the edge of his bed so the aching back set in pretty quickly. Doing the needle work is painstaking but enjoyble because it's an instant result, the figuring out of the placement of the dreads in a bit of a pain. You don't want them to be too uniform because that would look stupid, but there needs to be a neatness to is so when you weave your roots you're not going to put hair in the wrong dread and have them all mesh together...
Die Hard 2, Labyrinth, Back to the Future, classic films that passed the time even if I was watching them through squinting, sore eyes obscured by a mass of thick, curly black hair! This was probably the first time we had watched films together and neither of us fell asleep before the end, as much as I wanted to at some points... It got to about four dreads for the end and I swear he fell asleep resting his head on my leg as I was dreading the other side, the 'just resting my eyes' excuse was pulled out but I wasn't buying it. The last few were painful, I'd lost count of the amount of times I jabbed the needle right into my finger and there is definitely some of my blood in those locks.
Then it was finished. Everything ached, sore arse, numb arms, frozen back, aching and bloodied fingers. But it was worth it because they look pretty darn immense even if I do say so myself. The one right at the front needs weaving down a bit because it sticks up a wee bit too much and some of the ends need rounding off a little bit more but that will only take an hour or so and can be done over time. I crashed out pretty much stright away after sunrise about 7.20am and was awoken with him taking my lunch order and coming back with food for my poor aching body! I swear I will not be doing that again in a hurry but I'm glad I got to do something really cool for a very good friend who needed cheering up!
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