Locs at 3.5 years

Talk about the jump in updates, uh? I mean, let's face it....after the first year of growing locs, nothing exciting happens. It's the first year that is full of new products, methods, styles, emotions and after that - you get set in your ways and life moves on.

Hence why I had very few updates after a year. 2.5 years later and my locs are 100% mature. Ain't no doubt about it. They are growing, growing and growing. And that's about it. I haven't colored my locs in 8 months and for no other reasons than I'm lazy and too cheap to pay anyone to do it.

Accidental freeformin'...

These are mobile pics and I promise I'll get you higher-res photos, but I wanted to give y'all a quick peek at my locs as of late.

In the past 3-4 months, I may have retwisted twice. Just out of sheer laziness. In fact, at one point I just HAD to retwist because the new growth was starting to do it's own weird loc'ing thing. And by weird, I mean they were loc'ing up with each other. Which does nothing but make taking them a part a freaking pain.

Summer time is here and I'll do even less retwisting because there is something about the summer that makes my scalp insanely itchy. And the only relief I ever get is from washing the hair. And I'm not down for retwisting just to wash a few days later. No ma'am...

So yep. The 3.5 year old locs are still doin' their thang!

It's time to dye. Agaiiiin!

Sooooo, I colored my hair again! Weeeee! It's been a few months since I've done some color. I think the last time I did a dye job was in April. That's almost 6 months ago. Wowsers!

So yeah...it was time.

I battled between doing it myself and going to my loctician but honestly, y'all...I save SO much money doing my own hair. And yeah, a loctician can do it better but whatev...I'm not that bad. Despite not distributing the color as well as I would have liked to, I still think this is by far the best color job I've done. My hair was left ridiculously soft and the color took better than I expected.

 Here's what I used...

Freeform Summer Challenge: Check-In #2

What is this Freeform Summer Challenge I speak of? Click here for details.

In a few days I would have gone 2 months of not twisting my hair. Considering I'm rocking fully fledged afrolocs, I am SO excited about this. I will definitely be doing this next summer and as needed. I mean, it makes perfect sense. Why be so anal about twisting my roots in the summer time with all of the sweating and swimming I do? It's just so pointless. That and well....I really really like my freeform locs.

As much, if not more than my manicured locs.

Orange locs in the wind...

Every now and then I like to dress my kids alike.

Y'all do know I refer to my blogs as kids, right? Ha!! Clumps of Mascara had this photo posted over there and I'm posting the same photo over here.

It looks like my red locs (you know, from that rinse I did) have turned orange. I am absolutely in love with them. I want more orange locs! This was a shot of the locs after a few hours of boogie boarding. Surprisingly, my hair didn't get THAT wet. I had a few wet spots in the back but nothing that warranted a full wash. Then again, I'd say anything to get out of washing my locs.

In random news, I want to take up surfing this summer. Won't that be cool? I'll be a loc rockin' surfer chick. And then I'll start a blog called BlackGirlsSurf.com. Nah, I'm kidding. I've got enough blogs. :)

I spy...length!

Yesterday as I was drying my hair, I noticed something...

Length! And just to prove to y'all that I'm not exaggerating, I found a picture of my locs from this time last year.

And then almost TWO years ago...

So to all of you newbie loc'ers out there (shouts out to iRockLocs and my girl, Sheryl!), know that yours locs need only a gallon of love, 2 quarts of patience and just an ounce of manipulation to grow.