Hello once more!

Well, we’re still in month 8 of my dready journey, so there isn’t a great deal of news since the last update, but I’m sure I’ll manage to waffle away nonetheless

Oh I know what I can talk about - my new dread tool! I’d been planning to get one of these for quite a while, for tidying my roots. Here’s a (boring) photo of it:

Dread Tool

As you can see, it’s a little different from a crochet hook. A latch which flips open and closed means you can pass the hook through your dread with just the hair you want to move, without dragging any more through with it and disrupting the rest of the knots. My plan was to take some of the tufty loose hairs at my roots, ruffle them up between my fingers and thumb into a little dread-ball and pull them into the base of a nearby dread. I think a lot of people just do this without the assistance of a hook, but I wasn’t having much luck, maybe because the bases of my dreads are not very wide.

I found I wasn’t able to use the dread tool exactly as I’d expected. Before getting my dreads, when I was just reading around on the internet, I watched a video on the Dread Head HQ site of a dread-ball being pulled down inside the length of a dreadlock. It involved feeding a dread tool up inside the dread for a few centimetres, poking the hook out, catching the dread-ball and drawing it back down inside the dread’s length. This just didn’t seem at all possible with my dread tool or dreads. The end is far too large and blunt, and my dreads are too tight and impenetrable. I had to settle for just poking it through from one side of a dread’s base to the other, where the hair is still unknotted and not too dense to penetrate. Also, when it came to actually making a little dread-ball with the stray hairs it wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped, possibly because there wasn’t that much loose hair to work with. So overall I probably did a bit of a crummy job

I only did this on a few dreads anyway, as I was never planning to do it to every single one. Most of the frizzies don’t bother me. In fact, I think if my dreads all had perfect neat roots, they’d look a little severe around my face. Fuzzies have a nice softening effect. There were just a few specific areas I wanted to tidy up, and they turned out fine. The latch on the dread tool made a noticeable difference to how smoothly it all went. A couple of times I didn’t let it close fully before pulling the hook back out of the dread, and it caused all sorts of annoying tangling and disrupting of hairs I hadn’t wanted to move.

Once I had poked and pulled a dread-ball into the unknotted base of a dreadlock, I root-rubbed and palm-rolled to help secure it in there. I’ve just done my first hair wash since then. I was pretty gentle, and didn’t really rub at the roots at all, so as not to undo too much of the work I’d done. I haven’t examined them closely yet, but at a glance it all looks ok.

I didn’t do any before and after pics of all this, because I think the difference is too subtle for anyone other than myself to notice. Just one of those personal adjustments which are worth it if they make you happy, even if they seem pointless to everyone else 

The process works though, and I’d recommend it if you are starting to be really bugged by some of your frizzies. Most of them will find their way into a dread eventually without any assistance, but it’s nice to know you can tweak the details yourself if you want to. Don’t be too enthusiastic with root work; if you make your roots too tight they can become painful, lead to broken hairs and restrict finger-access for proper scalp washing.