New Natural Style - Diagonal Cornrows with Twists

These are my two strand twists at 12.5 months. Taken on 11/14/06. They don't seem that much longer than the picture from August, but fatter/fuller. The parts are a bit bigger.

Remember this one? I actually liked my twists better at this stage, because they were spikier and seemed to last longer.

Because my twists started to shrink like crazy and I was getting tired of it (I wore two strands for 5 or 6 months straight!) I decided to take it back to the old school with some good old fashioned cornrows. "Braiding it up and letting it grow" was actually suggested by a male friend. I went for it considering that men always seem to grow their hair twice as fast as us - they wear "protective styles" all the time without even knowing it! Also I just wanted to try something new and work on my cornrowing skills.

I took out the front half of my twists and cornrowed it. Styling a section of your hair versus your whole head is a great way to save time while getting a whole new look, and avoid stress if you usually get tired arms or short of patience halfway through.

Not bad considering I haven't done a cornrow in more than 5 years. Again, I forgot about the smooth hairline thing. I later discovered that a dab of FOTE Aloe Vera Gel at the root does wonders for that.

So, for a few days I wore the front cornrowed with the back in fuzzy and shrunken two strands. I was in a rush that first day, so I just clipped back the ends of the cornrows with some pin curl clips. Later I did it properly with some bobby pins.

You can see the frayed (color damaged) auburn tips peeking out of some of the cornrows. They take extra effort to smooth down, which can be done with a lot of moisturizing. As you can see, I didn't really do a lot of moisturizing. I used a bit of Gloss Pomade from Kinky Curly, and some of my essential oil and water spritz. It worked great on the un-colored portion of my hair although I didn't bother to pull the edges in too well.

The next step was to unravel and braid my twists one by one for a new new style - more pics soon!

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