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Sectioning Hair
Wheather your want smart, uniform, lined up exactly sized dreadlocks or different sized dreads in more natural positions all over your head, sectioning your hair off to begin with is essential. Sectioning allows you to ensure you have the correct amount of hair for each dread, its also means you can insure you make square sections; this is essentail if you want round dreads as rectangular section hair tends to make flat dreads!
How big the section you create will define how thick your dreads are 0.5"-1" sections are about right for average sized dreads and you can go up to 2.5" sections for thick dreads, any bigger than that and you may have trouble bringing them together! The thickness of your hair will also play a part in how much hair is required to make dreads of a desired thickness, with thinner hair requiring much bigger sections for the same sized dreads then thicker hair.
As you section off each bit of hair whack a band on it it to hold it in place ready to be backcombed.
How thick or thin your dreads are going to be is persoanl preference. Fatter dreads tend to loc up easier as there is much more hair to tangle up, but can sometimes look a little scraggly and will take much longer to dry, where as thinner dreads can also look scraggly but are generally considered more socially acceptable. We think if you go for something in between you cant go far wrong;-).
Knattying It Up
At this point if you have purchased any dread tightening products now would be a good time to apply them. Making your hair knatty with anyone of our tigtening products will make the whole process ALOT easier. The DreadheadHQ accellerator is a firm favourite for this job and what we use when doing peoples dreads, although all other tighteners we stock would also be suitable.
Whatever you choose to apply assure you let your hair dry out before your start back combing....
Back Combing.
Now for the tricky part...
Take the band off a chosen section, if you opted for the Supa Dupa Dread Kit Ultra and have some peppa now would be a good time to apply it. Next take your metal comb and slowly start pushing the hair upwards, you dont want to push all the hair in the section, what you want to do with each stroke is slowly push more and more hair up bit by bit. Its hard to describe, but if your doing it right your know as a dreadlock will start to form, if your doing it wrong you will also know as you will get a tiny, short, very fat knot of hair at the root. Its really important that as you backcomb you push tightly against the newly formed dread, it may be uncomfortable but it really doesnt have to hurt. Keep doing this untill you have nothing left to hold onto at the very tip of your dreads you may want to back comb hard and fast to really form a good hard knot to give your tips a fighting chance.
Back combing is the hardest part of dread making to explain, but the easiest way to learn is to try, so get busy and keep faith - you can make those dreadies!
Sorting Out The Tips
Once you have complete backcombing all your dreads you will probably be left with these rat tail ends on your newly formed locks. Unfortuantley theres nothing you can do to those locks that are going to make them stick first time, tips take a lot of perseverance to get to round and really are the last thing you want to worry about, concetrate on getting the body of your dreads as tight ass as possible and everything else will follow.
That said you probably will want to smarten your locks up, for the sake of presentability - so what you need to do is grab whatever loose hair you have left at the tips, fold it over against the hard backcombed bit of the tip and wack a band on it. This should take care of presenatbility for the time being;-).
Achoring All The fresh Dreadage In
Now you have a complete set of tight, sexy locks (yay:-D), next to help hold all that fresh dreadage in place you need to use some wax.
Take a small (skittle sized) bit of wax and apply it to your dreads working from the top to the bottom, its really important that you dont over do it with the wax, two-three skittle sized clumps per dread should be more than adequate for even the longest dreads. You want to be able to feel the wax and smell that gorgeous scent, but not see the wax. To much wax can ruin a perfectly good head of dreads, to little will mean that they take forever to come together.
Finishing Up
Once your all waxed up your done! Send us some pictures, tell us how it went and go out to show off those bad boys!
Onwards to the next part of the guide >>