yarn twist extension adventures

Okay, so we've struggled with hair a bit.  Lucy does NOT like me to work with her hair, and she also doesn't like water in her face, over her head, so bath/detangle time can deteriorate pretty quickly.  Her hair is a lot longer than it looks because it bounces up and is so very curly.  (It's awesome!).  But she'd love hair that hangs down.  In fact, she has started doing dramatic hair tosses (with no hair actually moving).  Just practicing.  So we decided to try yarn twist extensions.  (I followed the tutorial at chocolate hair, vanilla care).  It is her own hair, twisted in with strings of yarn, and then the yarn extends longer to give it some more length.  It is supposed to be good for hair, because the ends are protected in the twists and the yarn keeps it moisturized.  Without further ado...

I did the first few rows on Friday to get the hang of it, and to get some "buy-in" from my girl who doesn't like to let me mess with her hair.  She bough tin all right.  She did a lot of flipping this hair over one shoulder and then over the other one.  If she touched it once, she touched it 1467 times.

 Up close of the twists.  I thin they look really pretty!

On Saturday morning, a friend and I put in about 3 hours, both of us working the whole time, with a few short breaks.  She did great.  She had buckets of suckers, gum, and push pops.  Usually these are totally off-limits, but I wanted her happy :).  She was such a trooper, but finally just got worn out.  I think it was hard, and I can understand having had a perm before, to hold your neck strong for that long, kind of pulling against the people pulling on your head.  Our solution was to enlist Nana to hold her and let her rest her head against Nana's shoulder to get some rest.  It worked pretty well!

See her face?  She was about done for the day.  (Notice the bribery sucker, still in hand)

The above picture is after Sunday's session.  Our second pair of hands didn't show up, so Nana stepped in and proved herself to be quite the hair twister.  She did great!  We needed it, too, because I was beginning to despair.  This project seemed to have gotten out of hand and was taking longer than I expected.  But Nana saved the day and we got all but the very top done.  We finished that up in about 1 hour on Monday morning, and .... TADAA:

CHECK OUT THE HAIR ON THIS BEAUTY :)

(A closer look at the parts.  I don't think they're super noticeable.  I did box-ish parts (not as precise as traditional box parts).  I love how it turned out!

Notes:

1)  This took about 11 hours hours of manpower, at least this first time.  YIKES!  I sure do love this girl :)

2)  I will be trimming it quite a bit shorter.  That much hair would be overwhelming, and I have knotted off the twists below the length of her actual hair, but maybe 2/3rds as long as it is now.  I can cut the excess yarn off and it will still hang down and swing about, but hopefully be manageable for her.

3)  How cute is this?  What a good guy!  Uncle John got "yarn extensions" too.  (And actually, so did Pap and Nana, but I couldn't catch them on camera!)

4)  Lucy and I stopped in the hair isle at WM today because I didn't have any bands big enough to fit around all that hair, and she picked up this large hand mirror and was walking around WM with one hand on the cart and one arm straight out, holding the mirror out to admire herself.  She's so funny.